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Avoid mentioning punishments in the help center. The goal of the help center is to explain what a user needs to do to be successful in the community and how to do that. The description of incorrect behavior should mostly exist only as part of additional clarifications of the expected behavior and without any mentions of penalties for wrong doing.
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Add new articles to the help center only if it is something that the community must have. Some of the community rules will always exist in an implicit form and are passed from user to user through their interactions with each other. That is fine.
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Describe the rules in general terms. To cover all nuances of the culture of your community in detail you will need a lot of very narrow rules. Too narrow rules always need to be supplemented with exceptional situations which makes the help center to be even bigger and more complicated. At some point, users may even not try to read it through.
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It is very important to create a culture in which users respect each other from the very first day. Newcomers derive many rules from observing interactions of other users and adapt to existing norms that they have derived.
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Users must agree with the rules and internalize them for the rules to be effective.
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Some help center articles require consultation with a lawyer, for example, terms of service. Be careful.
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.