The “corporate Wikipedia” problem: how do you get teams to actually use Confluence?

[#1]

Confluence gets introduced to most teams as "the place where we document things." And that label sticks.

Years later, the same teams are paying for a tool they're using at maybe 20% of its capacity, writing pages nobody reads, building spaces nobody navigates, and still exporting data to Excel every time they need an actual report.

What's interesting is that most of the workflow gaps people complain about (no visibility into project status, no way to track decisions, no reporting that stakeholders can actually read) are solvable inside Confluence. Not with workarounds, but with features that are already there.

We've seen this across the teams we work with as a Marketplace partner. The moment someone realizes Confluence can host a live sprint dashboard, a proper Gantt chart, or a RAID log that the whole team actually uses, the "corporate Wikipedia" reputation starts to fade pretty quickly.

So I'm curious: how is your team actually using Confluence beyond documentation? Has anyone made it work as a genuine project hub, or does it always end up competing with Jira, Notion, or a shared Excel file?

Would love to hear real examples, especially from ops or project management teams.