Re: Internal wikis - do they ever live up to expectations?
Yes, internal wikis can very definitely live up to expectations. But the first thing to emphasise is that sharepoint ≠ wiki.
Particularly with managed service or on-call, a good way to build up your wiki is to put your new engineers into the oncall rota early on, but with an experienced engineer to also be on call if the newbie gets stuck. First port of call is the wiki. Then, if still not sure how to deal with the alert, call the experienced engineer. Nothing like that for giving the experienced engineer an incentive to update the wiki!
Get your new engineers to document anything that they have had to ask about. Makes it easier for next time.
Employ engineers in their 40's - need to wiki everything as you want to remember the next time you have to deal with an alert at 3am, and the memory is not what it was!
Move people between teams - again an incentive for making the wiki better while you try and get up to speed.
Make the wiki easily searchable - if it is easier to search than ask, people use the resource. The more useful it is, the more people are likely to update the wiki.
Change the culture to one of expectation that it will be on the wiki. As a sysadmin, get fed up of answering the same question, and wiki it - then point people to the wiki.
Ideally you make it into a resource that people use in the same way they do Google. Why not use it?