I just realized that several 'Notable question' badges have been awarded recently which were not very special. They just accumulated that many page views because they were posted like a year ago or so.
Would it not be better to close those questions for accumulating pageviews, or, alternatively, to put the views requirement to a certain number per year?
As a complement to the answers already given, you should keep in mind that the numbers for these badges seem to be determined uniformly for the entire Stackexchange-2.0 network, of which the representative site is stackoverflow.com. That site has traffic several orders of magnitude greater than this one, which makes the badge dynamics totally different. Questions fall off the front page in a few minutes, but there are way more voters and some questions and answers have vote totals in the thousands. Thus, "Notable Question" is strangely difficult to get there, since your question is hard to get noticed, but "Epic" has a lot more of a chance, whereas here it is virtually impossible (only a few of the top users have it, compared with the enormously common "Good Answer"/"Good Question" badges, or "Necromancer"). And "Tenacious", which on Stack Overflow is a dime a dozen, is pretty much out of reach on this site, even though it's only silver.
Note that "Notable Question" is not so easy to get here, because of the lower traffic. I wouldn't say that is one of the more unbalanced badges, whereas Epic and especially Legendary clearly are.
No. I think you're reading too much into the name of the badge. For the purposes of the badge, "notable" simply means any question with 2500 views. To some extent, this also reflects the degree to which it is useful to others, since much of the site traffic is generated through links via search engines. Whether the definition meets the everyday definition of what the word "notable" means is irrelevant. This distinction between technical definitions and everyday language is found in every domain. (Think, for example what the words 'normal' and 'random' mean in statistics compared to their everyday meanings.)
As silver badges go, this one isn't so difficult to get, (compared, e.g. to the Epic badge), but the whole badge system (and in fact the whole reputation system) shouldn't be taken too seriously anyway.
notable question badges, and half of the questions are just common ones asked just ages ago, where is the benefit?
notable question ≠ great question? I'm not impressed... :P
Remember that badges are only badges. They are not supposed to mean too much to the community, they mean more to their owner. If you post a question and it gets 2500 views, you get a Notable Question badge, that's it. It is a good motivation for posting well-stated, well-tagged questions since such ones are easier to find. The quality of the question is reflected in the Good Question badge which is awarded for 25 upvotes.
I think that the badge design is good. As for the name, you can suggest a better one and if it is good, it might get changed.
