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I have a couple of questions concerning the score for specific tags, and the corresponding tag badges.

It appears that community wiki (CW) answers do not count towards tag badges, even when they answer a non-CW question — I can give examples if required. I do not know if this is the intended behaviour. Nevertheless, it appears to give a poor account of the situation, e.g. for users who use CW answers as a method to not gain reputation (granted, most of these users are probably not interested in badges).

Question 1: Why do CW answers in non-CW questions not count for tag badges? What are your personal opinions regarding this?

The score for each tag (which determines the awarding of the corresponding tag badge) is shown on each user's profile page. The hover text for each tag score in every user's profile says (the numbers are made up, and will differ in reality): "... Answered 3 non-wiki questions with a total score of 16." Again, this score (16 in the example) does not actually take into account any CW answer, even on non-CW questions.

Question 2: If CW answers do not count towards the tag score, should the above hover text be modified to become an accurate description of the score? E.g. the above could become "... Gave 3 non-wiki answers with a total score of 16."

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    $\begingroup$ @Oded: why does "Question 2" not qualify as a bug (in the documentation)? $\endgroup$
    – user9072
    Sep 25, 2013 at 21:47
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    $\begingroup$ Took me a while to see what this was about. The text for answers shouldn't mention question status, as that is not relevant, but the answer status, which is. Fixing. $\endgroup$
    – Oded
    Sep 26, 2013 at 10:42

2 Answers 2

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Fixed the phrasing as suggested, as the score for answers is calculated from non-wiki answers - the wiki status of the question they are on is not relevant.

With you in the next build (rev 2013.9.26.1037).

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Regarding Question 1: The main usecase (by design) of a community-wiki answer (and, more generally, post) is, as somewhat implied by the name, to offer the possibility that "the community" provides an answer. For example, it can be a summary of information provided in comments, or somebody has a half-way answer and hopes somebody can finish it, provide missing details, improve it in other ways and so on. On MO it is not used much in this form, but on other sites one can find answers to which numerous users contributed (a bit like our big-lists but that they do the list in one or a few posts). This is also documented by the fact that for CW-posts the point-threshold allowing others to edit is a lot lower (100 vs 2k). And, thus, the OP also does not gain any points from such an answer, since it is (to be assumed/likely) that not all the credit for the post should go to them.

For the same reason it makes sense to have this approach for the tag-badges, too. One could however envision that for badges this is different, since other score-based answer badges (nice, good, great answer and some others) are still given for CW answers.
Personally, I do not have any particular opinion what would be better.

In any case, the behavior seems by design, it is documented in the following semi-official meta.SO post (part of the FAQ on badges) https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/68395/228113

What counts is the score of non-CW answers (that are still present, i.e., not deleted).

Regarding Question 2: I think the hover-text does not really describe the actual situation, and I cannot see any good reason for it. Either it should be precise (as suggested in OP) or it should be simple/over-simplified and not mention CW at all.
To mention CW but in an incorrect way seems like an oversight. Since I assume it is not hard to fix, I think it should be fixed.

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