Badges and reputation

Reputation is a running total of times other people found something you wrote correct. Badges are thresholds on specific kinds of contribution. Both are published mechanisms rather than editorial judgements, which is the point: you can check whether someone's badges are consistent with their reputation, and if they are not, something is wrong with the system rather than with your reading of it.

How reputation moves

Gold badges

Silver badges

Bronze badges

Why the thresholds are published

Because an unpublished threshold is an editorial judgement wearing a badge's clothes. If "Chromatographer" required twenty-five accepted answers on hplc, mass-spec or purity and we did not say so, you would have no way to distinguish it from a moderator liking somebody. Published thresholds also mean the badge set is internally consistent: a contributor with forty thousand reputation cannot be missing a bronze badge that a two-thousand-reputation contributor holds, because the thresholds are monotonic in the underlying counts.

The names are ours and are not borrowed from anywhere. Two of them — Sourced and Citation Needed — exist specifically to reward the behaviour the sourcing policy asks for, because a norm nobody is rewarded for following is a norm nobody follows.