The help panel is a feature that allows newcomers to post questions directly to their wiki's help desk while they are in the middle of editing a page. This feature idea would also be applicable for the mentorship and help modules of the newcomer homepage, which also allow newcomers to post questions directly.

@revi brought up this idea when @Trizek-WMF, @revi, and @MMiller_WMF were brainstorming around how to ensure that newcomers asking questions in the help panel would receive prompt responses from experienced editors. These questions go to the help desk, and experienced editors only notice them from their watchlists. But we think that fast answers make a difference.

The idea is that we could automatically ping editors who have signed up to answer newbie questions, essentially assigning out questions to experienced editors to answer. Perhaps a bot could ping or leave talk page messages for editors who sign up to receive them, alerting them that a question needs answering. @Urbanecm has set up similar systems before.