The culture of an online community is a set of beliefs, values and norms collectively held within the group. One needs to define the initial piece of culture before launching a community by setting up a help center, the description of how a person can successfully get engaged in the community.
Keep the help center short. Add only rules that the community must have at the beginning. The help center will evolve naturally when users encounter a problem, discuss it, and ask the community manager to make changes to the help based on the results of the discussion. There are two critical aspects that are needed to be covered in the help center of any community: a description of what is on-topic in the community and any kind of encouragement to users to be kind to each other.
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.