No matter the medium, you can't really force people to click links or read what you send them.
It's kind of an inherent problem with social a game such as BM. Sometimes groups don't really put the minimum effort required to further the collective good, it's hard to regulate behavior. The wiki is external, but linking to it is easy and can be done inside the text editor with [[ ]]. So when it's just a click away, is it really that less accessible on the wiki than on some remote in-game page, like guild boards, region descriptions, or realm bulletins? The wiki is now largely outdated, but that's a player problem. People used to be zealously dedicated to it, with many newspapers, realm pages, and such always up to date. The Forum sucked in a lot of that out of character activity, but decreasing densities also means that that there are a lot less potential contributors per page. Player ageing and game culture shifts are also to blame. It used to be that just about every realm had a handful of extremely dedicated players, who'd be on IRC at every turn change, keep all the documents up to date, go about and recruit others, and so on. Lots of them left, the rest just don't have the time anymore, now having kids, a career, and all. What is there to do? Can't really make up a rule that a realm needs at least X zealous players in order to exist.
This is very true but the simple fact is that, as a new player, you can quite easily play the game without ever even realising that there's anything on the wiki other than a detailed game manual.
That's why I think having a lot of the fluff on the wiki is a bad idea. Yes it's only a few clicks away but it's only something that you encounter directly within the game if another player puts a link in front of your face. On the other hand, every character can see things like region descriptions, ruler bulletins and the like. There's also the factor that if you want to update something on the wiki you have to switch to it, login to your wiki account, go to the page and then edit it - assuming you've learned the wiki formatting syntax properly so your edit doesn't look like a mess.
Look at it this way: Before we had region descriptions in game there was nothing stopping lords updating the region descriptions on the wiki. But after region descriptions became an in game thing then it didn't take long for lords to update their region descriptions, adding some pretty permanent (but periodically changing) flavour to the game in the process.
I think that if you had a similar facility
in game for realm history, character descriptions, army descriptions, newspapers, etc. then they would get a lot more usage simply because the average player is going to run into them regularly within the game rather than them all being left out of sight and out of mind on the wiki.
