Can we change the criteria for getting tag badges?

Question

Right now, we have the following badges for tags:

• Gold Badges – Two, and only JohnGB has been awarded them
• Silver Badges – Four, JohnGB has been awarded all of them and DA01 has been awarded one
• Bronze Badges — Twenty-eight, and 11 of them (~40%) have only been awarded to one person (usually JohnGB).

While JohnGB has been a valuable expert on this site and definitely deserves all of his badges, there are other experts on this site too that should be recognized. Also, those who are awarded Gold Tag Badge get a supervote for closing questions.

The problem is that the criteria to get these badges are very high. So high that most people will probably never achieve them:

Gold: Earn at least 1000 total score for at least 200 non-community wiki

Silver: Earn at least 400 total score for at least 80 non-community wiki answers

Bronze: Earn at least 100 total score for at least 20 non-community wiki answers

Our most used tags have between 1,500 and 2,000 questions, and the gold and silver tag winners have answered between 5-10% of these. I don't think it's likely that the experts in this field can match that.

Is there any way that we can change the criteria for badges to something that is more reasonable for this site, so that our experts in these tags can get badges to recognize their knowledge?

Answer 1

The tag badges (and all other badges) are network wide and can’t be changed on a single site. And I think this is fair, because you don’t have to remember badge award differences between sites (as many users are members of more than one site).

When it comes to score, UX.SE are one of the best sites when it comes to answer percentage. In relation to other sites we’re at the top. Unfortunately the other side of the coin is that we don’t have as many questions as other sites – which gives the high answer score.

To deal with this issue, and your tag badge issue, we need more users asking questions. That’s our real problem. The more questions we ask, the more tag count we get and the more tag badges will be awarded.