Golden rules of building Wiki community trust

Here are some of my key leanings from the past few years of working with wiki communities. I will write more about each of these points in the future posts.

• Use a license that maximizes content use. Give copyrights of the content back to the user.
• Promote your active users to roles of greater and greater responsibility. Make them administrators, content police, editors, spellcheckers etc.
• Create a space where all users can add value. Extract value form everyone: your readers, technical experts and language experts and the silent majority.
• Design for participation. Simple interface, easy to use.
• Don't enforce social norms with software. You need to explain those in writing and communicate them through forums and blogs. Trying to enforce behavior through software just invites people to game your system.
• Help the community define and evolve rules of cooperation.