"We Don't Do That Here": How Collaborative Editing with Mentors Improves Engagement in Social ...
summary
A monthlong deployment adds a just-in-time mentor Help Room and collaborative markdown editing to Stack Overflow so novices draft questions with mentors before posting. Out of ~70,000 eligible novices 520 enter, 271 speak with 63 volunteer mentors in 343 conversations. Mentored posts gain clearer context, code formatting, and culturally acceptable wording, are rerouted away from off‑topic or malicious queries, and show about a 50% average score increase.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction and acknowledgments
- 0:26Barriers for new users in technical communities
- 3:13Design of collaborative editing feature
- 5:24Feature in action with mentor interaction
- 6:51Results from 33-day live deployment
- 7:37Key findings on question quality
- 8:22Mentor-guided improvements and norms
- 10:28Participant satisfaction and feedback
- 11:32Human interaction and inclusivity benefits
- 13:18Scaling mentorship to other communities
- 14:01Summary and call to action
- 14:43Q&A session
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