How do you create and maintain a community wiki and FAQ?

A well-maintained community wiki and FAQ is one of the highest-leverage investments a mod team can make, because it reduces the volume of repetitive questions, helps new members orient themselves quickly, and provides a permanent, searchable record of community knowledge that no individual post can replicate. The challenge is that wikis require ongoing maintenance effort, and they are frequently started with good intentions and then allowed to become outdated. Reddit's wiki system is accessible through Mod Tools under the Content section, and moderators with wiki permissions can create and edit pages using markdown formatting. The wiki's permission settings allow moderators to control who can edit pages: mods only, approved contributors, or users who meet age and karma requirements. For most communities, starting with mods-only editing and expanding access as the wiki matures is a sensible approach. The index page, which functions as the wiki's homepage, should orient visitors immediately: a brief description of the community, links to the most important wiki sections, and a note about when the content was last reviewed. The FAQ section should address the questions that appear most frequently in new posts and in modmail — not the questions the mod team finds most interesting, but the actual highest-frequency questions from members. One practical way to build the FAQ content is to mine modmail history and search the subreddit for recurring question patterns before writing a single word. Maintenance requires assigning ownership. A wiki that nobody is specifically responsible for reviewing inevitably becomes outdated. Designating a specific moderator to review and update the wiki on a quarterly schedule, and building that task into the mod team's recurring responsibilities, is what separates wikis that remain useful from those that become a repository of stale information. Noting the last updated date prominently at the top of each major wiki section creates accountability and gives users accurate context for how current the information is.