3

I created The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom tag. Recently that tag crossed the 50 question mark so I would have expected to be rewarded another taxonomist badge but was not.

After doing some quick investigation it looks like the badge has not been rewarded on the site since December 2021.

screenshot of recent taxonomist bade awards

Which could mean a few things:

  1. There is a bug with the rewarding of the badge.
  2. The badge can only be awarded once and every tag with 50 posts created since 2021 has been created by someone that already has the badge.
  3. The tag was created by someone else and then deleted so my question didn’t actually create the tag (seems unlikely given the lack of others earning the badge).

Any ideas on what’s going on?

1
  • 1
    I believe badges are awarded on a job that runs once a day, so it might be awarded later on. Not 100% sure though. It seems to be being awarded on SO fine though.
    – Dragonrage Mod
    Commented Jun 17, 2023 at 4:29

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
4

I don't think it is bugged.

It's a fairly rare badge mainly because lots of tags don't reach 50+ questions on the site these days. I'd say that's primarily due to a few things:

  • Game releases and their popularity
  • Other sites have answers (Wiki sites as an example)
  • Arqade's traffic isn't what it once was
  • If you have the badge already, you can't get it again. So if you create a new badge and it reaches 50+ questions, the Taxonomist badge gets awarded to nobody.

You didn't earn the badge because you earned it already back in 2014 for and the badge can only be earned once.

6
  • To add, (and I think I saw this on a Meta SE post) - if a tag gets renamed, I think the progress for it resets. Though if the tag reached 50+ questions prior to its rename, the user gets to keep the taxonomist badge. If you look deep enough in the list for Arqade, you'll see a bunch of users who got the badge for a badge that is "no longer available". That would explain why Minecraft JE didn't see the taxonomist badge get awarded until 2020, because there was a site wide effort to cleanup and rename a whole bunch of the Minecraft tags, but there was easily 50+ questions for that tag by 2020.
    – Timmy Jim Mod
    Commented Jun 17, 2023 at 4:48
  • I'm ok with awarding the badge only once. But in this way some tag pages will not show who actually created the tag, since that information is available only if the taxonomist badge was correctly awarded to someone.
    – pinckerman
    Commented Jun 17, 2023 at 11:07
  • @pinckerman it's interesting that the tag information page for the tag doesn't seem to show who created it until it reaches 50+ posts.
    – Timmy Jim Mod
    Commented Jun 17, 2023 at 13:33
  • 1
    Yep, that's why I think they are related. This means that we may never have that information for tags created by other taxonomist owners.
    – pinckerman
    Commented Jun 17, 2023 at 17:02
  • @pinckerman and Timmy it’s an oddity for sure. I’m apathetic about something like this getting changed/fixed so won’t make suggestions on the main meta, but thank you for the explanation and discussion.
    – ahsteele
    Commented Jun 17, 2023 at 21:41
  • 1
    @ahsteele you're kicking down an open door, this thing has been bothering me for years...
    – pinckerman
    Commented Jun 17, 2023 at 22:11

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .