<p>Looking at <a href="http://stackexchange.com/leagues/19/year/stats/2016-01-01?sort=reputationchange&amp;page=1">the 2016 reputation league page</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>When your fellow users vote up your questions and answers on a Stack
  Exchange site, you generate reputation. Reputation is a rough measure
  of:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>how much the community trusts you</li>
  <li>your communication skills</li>
  <li>the quality and relevancy of your questions and answers</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>These friendly reputation leagues are an informal way of tracking your
  reputation within the community on a particular Stack Exchange.</p>
  
  <p>Reputation is capped at 200 per day, but remember that bounty awards
  and accepted answers are immune to this daily reputation cap.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>And I concur with that. As I pointed in the comments:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Simply going by the fact answering a popular question is much more
  worthy than answering an actually challenging question goes miles
  towards understanding what reputation reflects. It's a sign that a
  person can answer questions that helps the community most. In
  StackOverflow this is more blatant, often the highest ranked answers
  on a programming language are utterly basic, but that's where the
  community concentrates, and these are the questions that help the most
  members</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Tag badges sound more like measures of prowess in a specific subject to me.</p>
