There will be a contest when Together For Victory releases, which should help get the wiki updated.
On these competitions, is it worth giving it a week or two after the launch (perhaps not this time, but generally)? Only the betas will have played enough of TfV to update the wiki with much in the way of confidence initially, particularly for anything deeper than the statistics players would be able to read in tooltips in-game in any event. It'd also be handy to have some idea of what needs updating, and coordination in updating - I'm happy to update bits and bobs, but I've got limited time and capacity, and the current job now would involve:
- parsing the wiki to find out what needs updating;
- go off and gather the data;
- potentially finding someone else has updated it before I get back.
This was my experience when I did put some information together that could have been useful to the wiki (naval unit stats). I put the information together for my own benefit as well, and before the release of 1.2, so it was no skin off my nose when I checked and the wiki already had it sorted, but it highlighted the fact that any work I did on the wiki could well be wasted effort.
So what I find is that I'll only update the wiki if I go there to find something, and find it isn't there and so see a need for updating (which I've only done once, to some obscure modding-related thing). There's a huge amount of ineffiiency in the current set-up, which I'd imagine leads to limited wiki updates.
At the end of the day, a free-for-all wiki will never provide as good a coverage as something that has a degree of coordination and editorial oversight involved. It's no biggy for me (I know my way around the game well enough), but I'd think for games as complex as those produced by PDS, where the wiki doubles as the manual, that a bit more attention paid to the wiki would be good long-term for the customer base.
That said, let's have a look at the current state the wiki is in (I generally only go there for console commands myself, so I wouldn't know).
OK - if this doesn't highlight the issue, nothing will. The Beginner's Guide (possibly the single most important part of the wiki) was last updated for pre-release. The first link on the menus, and the first link that new players are likely to hit, hasn't been updated for over six months (and I'm afraid it's a pretty large undertaking, so not something I'd sign up to fixing at least before Christmas).
The second of the 'important links', Mechanics, is also last updated for pre-release.
Countries has been updated for 1.0
Console commands for 1.0
User interface for pre-release
Keyboard shortcuts for 1.1
In short, despite it being months since the release of 1.2, not a single one of the important links at the top of the wiki is up-to-date, and the most important links haven't been updated since before the game was launched.
If that doesn't suggest a need for a different approach (if the aim is to have the wiki as an effective tool for new players to understand the game), then nothing does. If, on the other hand, the wiki isn't supposed to be the key reference tool for new players, then a game of the complexity of HoI4 probably needs something else that is.
Edit: Sorry - this post changed form somewhat while being written - I do think leaving some time between patches and running the competition would be useful, but I think the results of the wiki approach to-date suggest that there are far more fundamental issues that need resolving.