This is why it annoyed me that so many people were outraged (or mock-outraged) that the Library of Congress would archive Twitter. It’s exactly the fact that Twitter tends to be topical, ephemeral, trivial, and faddish that make it worth a special effort to save.

In our time, historians are obsessed with the relatively few sources we have for casual thought in the ancient world – graffiti and so on. Knowing what ordinary people were thinking on ordinary days is important. For various reasons, our time is one of the first that will be able to leave that to later times.

Isn't subtle vandalism what's commonly known as 'history' ?

There already are tools that can colour the text of article showing how old or new (or change-resistant, or controversial, or important - if proper metrics are discovered) the section or sentence is... Basically all kinds of interesting meta-information could be overlaid with the article text, by examining article change history; and at some point - will be. The text-body of article is only a single dimension, but quite a lot of other information waits to be discovered and overlaid.

I hate reading them...but they're essential if you're looking into something controversial (which may not be evident if you don't know the subject already) and you're worried about the accuracy of the current page.

Some of the edit wars are mildly disturbing - it's like this nice social consensus on the topic page, but the history pages seethe with bitterness and resentment. A rather unpleasant reflection of our society and psychology, in a lot of cases :-/