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The idea is to award this badge when you get +5 and -5 votes on an answer.

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Justify your request. What positive behavior is this badge designed to motivate? –  Michael Petrotta Nov 11 '11 at 16:09
@NullUserExceptionஇ_இ: How the hell did you find that? –  Matt Nov 11 '11 at 16:19
@nulluserexception Yes, that would be one of many examples. –  karlphillip Nov 11 '11 at 16:40
@Matt That question got some attention yesterday and NullUserException is a frequent colaborator of the site, I imagine he saw it yesterday. –  karlphillip Nov 11 '11 at 16:43
@NullUserException_: What about this? At least make it harder... +10/-10 or +20/-20 –  Won't Nov 11 '11 at 17:21
@ಠ_ಠWon't Won't: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/87/… –  NullUserException อ_อ Nov 11 '11 at 17:27
Did you deliberately move the smiley to the left so it would be hard to autocomplete your name? –  NullUserException อ_อ Nov 11 '11 at 17:28
@karlphillip: Even this question itself deserves the badge –  MoJo Mar 4 '13 at 6:18

2 Answers 2

up vote 9 down vote accepted

No, a million times no.

"Controversial" answers are usually bad answers that people who don't know better vote up. Like this one.

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-1 I'm inclined to disagree with "are usually bad answers". But I respect your point of view. –  karlphillip Nov 11 '11 at 16:46
The "usually bad answers" part is probably right, not that I have any data. People tend to upvote things they think are right and downvote things they know are wrong –  Michael Mrozek Nov 11 '11 at 16:49
@MichaelMrozek: You should weight the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. A +300 -5 question probably isn't wrong. –  Justin Satyr Nov 11 '11 at 18:24

Aside from the question as to the usefulness of this badge, your +5 -5 suggestion also has issues. For example, it's the tendency of very highly voted questions to get at least five downvotes. It doesn't make sense for a +200 -5 question to earn a "Controversial" badge.

For example, most of the highest voted questions on RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags would earn (or come very close to earning) the badge even though it is clearly not warranted.

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