In setting up my wiki I followed the setup instruction which point to an ikiwiki.setup file that contains "verbose => 0".
I hadn't noticed that setting in there, but later when I changed my standard command of:
ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki.setup
to:
ikiwiki --verbose --setup ikiwiki.setup
I was quite surprised that that change didn't have any effect.
So two suggestions to fix this:
Make command-line arguments override settings in the setup file
Comment out all settings in the example setup file that are simply setting options to their default values. That way, the file will still be self-documenting, but command-line arguments will at least work for these settings while they remain commented out.