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I don't think this is anything to particularly worry about since I can't see it coming up very often, but the behaviour at Famous Examples that led to Charles Siegel getting the first gold badge was a little unusual.
I see that I can fairly easily replicate it. Without too much difficulty, I can offer gold badges to Anton (via "How to respond to 'I was rubbish at maths'?"), gowers or Hagen Knaf (via "Blackboards"), and with a little connivance from someone else I can award one to Tom Leinster (via "metric spaces").
No, I don't have a serious point to make. Do I ever?
I need more connivance than just one - but thanks for that one. I need JSE's answer to get three more votes (and either only three more votes, or for Tom's to get more as well so he always has double).
Hmm, I'm not sure I completely understand this gold badge. The rubric says: "Provided an answer that outscored an accepted answer with 10 votes by 2x". That wouldn't win any awards at the Campaign for Plain English! However, Charles' answer has 24 votes whilst the accepted answer has 14. I guess it's explainable if Charles' answer got to 24 whilst the accepted was only on 12; I presume that badges aren't withdrawn.
@Charles, though I think your answer is very good, I view the golden badges as not very helpful for mathematics community.
I personally would prefer my technical questions to get silver badges and my soft questions to not get them :) But as things work now, the technical questions don't stand much chance of getting many votes/views unless in a very general field.
By the way, "First answer accepted with at least 10 up votes" requires your answer to be first.
I am not convinced that any of the badges are very helpful for the mathematics community. If I want to get an impression of a user's standing, I look at the reputation, not the badges. I think badges are a nuisance, and might as well be removed altogether. (But I don't think so strongly enough to bother lobbying for it. They're a very minor nuisance after all.)
@CSiegel: Badges are never taken away, as far as I know. I agree that some of the badge descriptions are vague. You can usually figure out the exact rules by searching meta.SO. It's funny you picked out "Generalist" because that badge actually doesn't really exist yet, even on SO! As you can see, it's the only badge with zero recipients. They thought it sounded good and encouraged a good behavior, but never quite figured out how to implement it, so it remains a shell of a badge.
@hanche: I disagree. For one thing, badges often give some indication of the quality of a user's contributions relative to frequency. If they have 500 rep, but some "Enlightened" or "Nice Answer/Question" badges, that will generally mean that the user is not that active, but when they ask/answer something, it's good. That aside, people (maybe not you) find badges motivational, as some French guy once pointed out. That's why there are so many badges to encourage specific positive behaviors, like exploring the full functionality of the site ("Autobiographer", "Teacher", "Student", "Supporter", "Commentator", "Editor", "Cleanup", etc.) or helping out the community in various ways ("Critic", "Organizer", "Civic duty", "Citizen patrol", etc.). Even if they're useless for determining merit, they're so good at engaging new users that I wouldn't dream of removing them.
The descriptions are incredibly vague and that's worrying me. I'm trying to see how high I can get my 'rep' before I get a silver badge. I'm not sure what David Speyer's record was, but I fully intend beating it. I'm pretty safe on the 'Civic duty' badge, I make sure that I don't visit here at least one day a week (well, sometimes I visit anonymously on that day), 'Good Question' and 'Good Answer' are fairly safe though I'm keeping an eye on those and 'Favourite Question' (and may have to delete a question/answer if it gets dangerous), most of the others are reasonably safe too. I was worried about 'Generalist' and so was busy retagging any question that I was going to answer to one of my 'safe' tags, but now that Anton assures me it doesn't exist I'll stop doing that.
(David, what was your record?)
Andrew: You probably have broken my record. I remember that my second silver badge was Enlightened, for my answer to the Hidden Markov model question. I gave that answer on Nov 11. At that point my rep was about 3500. The first one was a few days earlier. I don't remember exactly when, but I would guess that it was right around when I crossed the 3000 barrier.
Great! Phone the Aquavit Book of Records (like the Guiness one only with more proof).
(I do remember that before you got your silver badge I was trying to figure out a way to ask a question specifically to get you a silver badge, but then you got one anyway so I didn't have to.)
For the record, I don't actually worry very much about badges; I just have a good memory for trivia.
fpqc- what is it with you and the peer pressure badge? Is it just because nobody else has it? It's not much of a mark of pride, you know.
Can we add "the cultivation of personae" to the list of things not to do in the FAQ?
@fpqc: Since you're not keeping your identity a secret, I'd like to strongly encourage you to use your real name as your user name on MO. I really think that real names bring a certain honesty to the community that makes it run more smoothly.
In case my approval is not a big enough carrot to get you to switch, I'll sweeten the deal. You're after the peer pressure badge, and that would be the most appropriate prize for succumbing to peer pressure to use your real name. So if you switch to using your real name, I'll downvote one of your low-scoring posts (eg this one), and I'm sure somebody else will join me, allowing you to collect your badge.
Wow, that was quick; I didn't even get the chance to vote it down. I think it may take a bit for the badge to register. If you haven't gotten it by tomorrow afternoon, I'll look into it.
@Harry: I changed your meta name, but I think you should have been able to do that yourself.
@Harry: I think you are a bit quick to utter the “troll” word. I think perhaps Sonia is overreacting a wee bit, but you're taking it right over the top. And since when is speculating on what will turn women off the same as speaking for all women? Get a life, please. Nobody here can speak on behalf of all mathematicians either, but we're still debating what will make mathematicians want to come here and to contribute.
Harry, if anybody is being a troll, it's you.
I contacted Fog Creek to find out what's going on with that badge (badges are usually awarded within an hour of the criterion being fulfilled). They've acknowledged that something is up and opened a case to look into it.
As far as I can tell, it's just a pissing contest of one. I don't see any signs that the overall attitude on the site toward badges has changed.
I think that the pissing contest analogy is good. We all know that the badges and reputation don't have any intrinsic worth, but when you find a number, it's fun to try to optimize it somehow. It's fun to try to get lots of reputation or to get lots of badges or to get particular badges (or in Andrew's case, to avoid getting any silver badges). The reputation and badges systems are set up so that in the process of having your own personal pissing contest, you will usually do something worthwhile. So long as nobody is being a nuisance, there's nothing wrong with having fun; it's actually encouraged.
I can't help going to so much trouble (it's actually very little). There's a bug, and I can't help reporting it.
Actually, it's only awarded for flagging as offensive. I'd rather change it so that the badge is awarded any of the ways to flag a post, but I'll see what I can do to change the description until the badge can be "fixed".
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