I'm an admin on a sports site and have dealt with this sort of thing a couple times over the years.

People are lazy in general, on my other forum I also see a lot of people who have a fetish for starting threads, something about seeing their name in lights.

I personally feel that the chatter is more a sign of a lively forum, even though many of the same questions and topics come up on a regular basis. To some extent it's unavoidable, but a couple suggestions might help.

1- A relatively up-to-date FAQ, with a label of "updated through" right up front. People will often check the FAQ, hit one or two links, get a dead link, think to themselves "screw that, I'm special" and pop up a new thread.

2- The Wiki and stickies in general don't get updated often enough, or it's hard to pick out the "ohmigod this is brilliant!" portions from the dross that's just a placeholder. Add in a function like a lot of sites like amazon use that say "was this article/post helpful to you?" The Rate this thread functionality already does that, I'd recommend rewording the label, moving it to the top of the thread and upsizing it to make it stand out.

Think about it, when you go to curse or amazon or a lot of places, you often sort by how other people have rated things. Since this isn't WoW General we shouldn't see too much of the punitive juvenile crap. Then you set a threshold of after X ratings with an average of blah or higher a flag is attached to notify that it needs to be moved to the wiki or does it automatically.

This rating tendency will take some effort for the community to train themselves to use and support it, and the forum software likely allows searching or ordering search results on rating basis.

3- While I have been a little guilty of "write my own thread" syndrome on occasion, I think one more productive approach to handling those repeat threads is to post a reply comment linking to the past thread. This is especially useful for stuff like the Hydra and FTL variants, or Falkor's quest acceptance work, because if the person gets off their butt and follows the link, they can work their way through a web of information and pick up a LOT of other links and information in the process. Constant cross referencing is the key, so someone can always find their way through the maze.