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On the user stats page, under tags, what does the little multiplier indicate? It's clearly not upvotes, as you can check anyone who's gotten a silver badge for a tag and see that the multiplier is much lower than 400. So is it:

  • Number of questions answered that have that tag?
  • Number of questions asked + answered that have that tag?
  • Estimate of the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
  • Something else entirely?
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2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

How many questions with that tag for which you have posts (answers or question).

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Is it actually the number of questions, or the number of posts? For instance, if you have several posts in one question, what does that count as? –  Jon Skeet Jul 6 '09 at 16:17
Not 100% sure, but I think it's posts. So two posts in the same question would count twice. You could run an experiment here on meta to find out- the data set is still small enough that things wouldn't get lost in the noise. –  Joel Coehoorn Jul 6 '09 at 16:25
Jon, just pick one of the tags, and count your answers. =P Pick something simple like C#. –  devinb Jul 6 '09 at 16:36
Looks like it's per question, not post. I have two answers in that kbd thread, but it doesn't list any of the tags as "x2". –  Hilarious Comedy Pesto Jul 6 '09 at 17:00
@Pesto: try adding a community wiki post to the thread and see what happens. –  Joel Coehoorn Jul 6 '09 at 17:09

Testing the 'posts' vs 'questions' theory: will delete soon.

To the curious: this is the only question I've posted to with the 'statistics' tag. Prior to this post it showed exactly one use of this tag on my profile. Afterwards the tag doesn't show at all. It could be a community wiki thing (in which case it's a bug!), or it could be questions and other recent activity has pushed it off the page. Either way, this number is similar to others that are known to be un-normalized and frequently out of date, so I'm going to let this stay a little longer.

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Fun! Thanks for taking the time - I've always been a bit curious about what they really meant on the stats page. –  womp Jul 6 '09 at 16:47

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