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  1. null (Ed.)
    Adopting new technology is challenging for volunteer moderation teams of online communities. Challenges are aggravated when communities increase in size. In a prior qualitative study, Kiene et al. found evidence that moderator teams adapted to challenges by relying on their experience in other technological platforms to guide the creation and adoption of innovative custom moderation "bots." In this study, we test three hypotheses on the social correlates of user innovated bot usage drawn from a previous qualitative study. We find strong evidence of the proposed relationship between community size and the use of user innovated bots. Although previous work suggests that smaller teams of moderators will be more likely to use these bots and that users with experience moderating in the previous platform will be more likely to do so, we find little evidence in support of either proposition. 
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  2. Integrating new users into a community with complex norms presents a challenge for peer production projects like Wikipedia. We present The Wikipedia Adventure (TWA): an interactive tutorial that offers a structured and gamified introduction to Wikipedia. In addition to describing the design of the system, we present two empirical evaluations. First, we report on a survey of users, who responded very positively to the tutorial. Second, we report results from a large-scale invitation-based field experiment that tests whether using TWA increased newcomers' subsequent contributions to Wikipedia. We find no effect of either using the tutorial or of being invited to do so over a period of 180 days. We conclude that TWA produces a positive socialization experience for those who choose to use it, but that it does not alter patterns of newcomer activity. We reflect on the implications of these mixed results for the evaluation of similar social computing systems. 
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