You are way off on that one. Any game that's a sequel will not be able to give you the full story. World of Warcraft is a sequel, plain and simple. Granted it's one of the most complex and spectacular video game sequels ever made, but that's essentially what it is. You don't start reading a series halfway through and expect to get the whole story as to what is going on. Many authors do take the first chapter (or in some cases 2 or 3) to give you a brief rundown as to what has gone before, but 100% of the time it's nowhere near as good as actually reading that book and your understanding of everything that came before will be severely limited.

These articles are indeed like cliff notes as they give you a summarized rundown of events OR a compilation of fragments of lore about a specific individual or location or event that is not anywhere in the cannon media (games, books, comics, etc). If you want a full rundown of what has happened you should go play the lead up games (Orcs & Humans, Tides of Darkness, Beyond the Dark portal, Reign of Chaos, The Frozen Throne) and read the Novels and comics as well as scour wowpedia (and possibly wowwiki) and learn all there is to know about the vast universe that is Warcraft. We'll see you in 2012 when you're done (if you're a fast reader, cheat on the games, and can lay your hands on copies of said games that will run on today's computers) ;)