8

So far for an unknown reason (at least for me) there have been no generalists (i.e. those who provided non-wiki answers of 15 total score in 20 of top 40 tags) till now and since today the situation has changed and there are 41 of them. Of course most of them could have been generalists for a long time, however they've become just today.

Why this mathematica.stackexchange cambrian explosion?
What has happened?

Edit

Today the same issue with 130 explainer badges.
What is the ultimate criterion for this badge?

3
  • 1
    Hehe, I was not even aware I´d been generalized until now :D
    – Yves Klett
    Sep 20 '14 at 15:34
  • 2
    Re: your edit, see this – meta.stackexchange.com/q/239898
    – rm -rf Mod
    Oct 1 '14 at 15:05
  • 1
    Perhaps something to do with global SE oxygene levels and predation?
    – István Zachar
    Jul 5 '16 at 16:06
10

One of the criteria for that badge to be awarded is that the site has to have at least 40 tags with more than 200 questions.

Until today, that was not the case. Now, it is - and thus the badge can be awarded to all those who qualify. Congratulations!

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  • 2
    Incidentally this "explosion" indicates to me that this badge is not well tailored to our site. I mean that the hardest part of getting the badge was getting enough Questions posted, when the badge should ostensibly be about Answers. Perhaps those numbers could be adjusted for other sites that have not yet had that explosion. Certainly it seems more common here to have a spread of answers across tags and I imagine that is the case on other topic-focused sites as well. Also if Polymath is ever implemented I hope these considerations will be taken into account.
    – Mr.Wizard
    Sep 20 '14 at 6:14
  • 2
    @Mr.Wizard What is Polymath intended to be?
    – Artes
    Sep 20 '14 at 9:08
  • 1
    @Artes It was proposed as a Gold version of Generalist. See: (12603)
    – Mr.Wizard
    Sep 20 '14 at 10:22
  • I suspect that, no matter how we tweak it, a generalist badge is gonna still be a nit narrow on sites dedicated to a single platform, @mrwizard.
    – Shog9
    Sep 20 '14 at 14:12
  • @Shog9 I imagine it is understandably a low priority but I would be curios to see some numbers. I think the idea of "generalist" still applies even on a site like Mathematica, if the parameters were adjusted some, but perhaps the figures don't support my intuition. Please remind me: is there currently a public API to get the data used to generate this badge?
    – Mr.Wizard
    Sep 21 '14 at 7:24
  • It took SE a long time to implement generalist as they weren't sure what needed to be included, and almost 3 yrs to get to that point isn't bad. I think we have a higher percentage of users who qualify for generalist than SO, so I'm not concerned with it.
    – rcollyer
    Sep 23 '14 at 14:26
  • @Shog9 I find your answer quite clear when it is related to the generalist issue however new doubts appear when it comes to the explainer problem. Thank you for your support.
    – Artes
    Oct 1 '14 at 10:46
  • Explainer is a brand-new badge, @artes - more on that in a bit
    – Shog9
    Oct 1 '14 at 18:37

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