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With the increasing number of garbage questions on the site, it's becoming more and more difficult to find good questions to answer. And with the increasing number of users who don't bother accepting answers, there's no guarantee that a valid answer will be accepted.

The end result is that badges in language-specific tags are becoming ever-more difficult to obtain, unless you're willing to stoop to answering garbage questions instead of closing them. This perverse incentive rewards only those who answer, while completely neglecting those who curate.

It's time for that to change: tag badges should be awarded to those who curate questions in these tags, too. I'm not sure what the criteria should be, but a first pass might be to modify the existing criteria for badges. For example, the bronze language tag badge requirement is:

Earn at least 100 total score for at least 20 non-community wiki answers in the <language> tag.

This would be redefined as:

Earn at least 100 total score for at least 20 non-community wiki answers in the <language> tag.
-or-
Cast a close vote on at least 100 questions that went on to be closed in the <language> tag.

This would immediately bump a huge number of curators up to gold-badge status, which would dramatically help in stemming the influx of garbage questions - because now those curators could immediately close said questions with a single vote, as opposed to voting, then having to wait and hope that two other curators will cast the same vote.

If modifying the existing badges is too difficult, a new set of language-specific badges named <language>-curation, with the appropriate criteria, could be commissioned, with the gold variants having the same Mjolnir abilities as the current language tag badges.

It goes without saying that in either case, these badges should be awarded retroactively.

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    Editing and close voting can very often be done perfectly well without any subject matter knowledge.
    – yivi
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 8:17
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    You don't need to be an SME (or to have any clue about a technology at all) to recognize and curate low-quality content. You need to know how SO works and what it strives to be. For example, just because I know that a C++ debugging question with images of code needs debugging details, doesn't mean I could find suitable duplicate targets for C++ questions. Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 8:18
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    "And with the increasing number of users who don't bother accepting answers".. yeah well, once a Question is accepted, there's probably to lot less chance of getting another Answer, so personally, I'd never accept any Answer if I posted a Question.
    – Scratte
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 8:20
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    I'd be more inclined to give silver badge holders some additional privileges. Would be a better solution to the same issue. It has been suggested on the past in different forms.
    – yivi
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 8:20
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    "And with the increasing number of users who don't bother accepting answers, there's no guarantee that a valid answer will be accepted. ... The end result is that badges in language-specific tags are becoming ever-more difficult to obtain." Since accepting answers has nothing to do with getting tag badges, I don't see how this conclusion follows from that fact.
    – Ryan M Mod
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 8:22
  • Just to be clear: "because now those curators could immediately close said questions with a single vote" means this is effectively about awarding curators with a dupe hammer? Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 8:23
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    Since people do everything for badges (see the armies of robo-reviewers), would this not potentially do more harm than good? Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 8:27
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    How exactly is single voting duplicate closure helpful for dealing with the influx of garbage? Duplicates aren't dealt with by roomba. So now you moved the 3 close vote requirement to be 3 delete votes. Not to mention this just seems intent on abusing duplicate closure. If a question is unclear it should be voted to close as unclear, not hammered shut with a "maybe duplicate". Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 9:18
  • First of all, how to determine whether a tag is a language tag?
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 9:38
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    Though, personally, I don't disagree that curation should be rewarded (there are far too many people that don't make use of their curation privileges in my opinion), this isn't going to solve the problem in my opinion. Unfortunately, I suspect that rewarding curation (which many users incorrectly understand as "gate keeping" and "unwelcoming") would actually make things worse though, where questions that can easily be made on-topic by the OP or other users get closed/deleted much quicker as certain users hunt their internet points.
    – Thom A
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 10:28

1 Answer 1

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Let's not overload the functionality of tag badges even more

I'm all for giving effective curators the power to curate more effectively, but let's not overload the tag badges more than they already are. Tag badges are about answering. They represent a difficult achievement in answering questions. They happen to confer a particular curation ability as well, but curation shouldn't be an alternate means of obtaining the badge.

If Stack Overflow wanted to do something like this, it should be its own system with its own, separate means of awarding privileges.

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    ...and I say this as someone with thousands of "successful" close votes in a tag where I do not have a gold badge.
    – Ryan M Mod
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 8:31
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    Agreed. I've lamented this in the past - the current system means that if a user answers a lot of duplicates, they can easily get a dupe hammer. If a user closes a lot of duplicates, they have difficulty obtaining a dupe hammer. Trying to merge this into badges treats an XY problem, to me. People who do a lot of curation should absolutely be awarded with more curation options. I just don't think the current system is a very good fit. I think it fundamentally does not for incentivise curation. So, trying to change the gold badges seems like a band-aid.
    – VLAZ
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 11:26

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