Why it is important to correct new users’ posts by editing them yourself?

Why it is important to correct new users’ posts by editing them yourself?

People start participating on your platform with some assumptions about the rules. Those assumptions come from people’s personal previous experience. If your community has some unique rules, users will discover them only when they do something in a wrong way and someone brings this fact to their attention.

One of the best ways to help new users adapt to content standards of your community is to correct all of their posts if they are not up to the standard, rather than providing them a list of shortcomings. Editing is positive feedback. When you improve someone’s post, the author sees that in your community users are willing to help others when needed. The regular users who see your edits derive the culture of how new users should be treated in the community.


This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.