In general, I see good commit messages as a Talmudic codification of a company's oral knowledge - complete with back-and-forth conversations, contradictory points of view and distinct characters. Still better than having to go talk to the people involved, some of whom may no longer be in the organization.

(Specifically with commit messages as Gemara and wikis as the much more organized and impersonal Mishnah.)

Or, hear me out, let's add the space flight knowledge to the existing talmud.

There’s a theory that all written artifacts are at most 1000 years old. Christian dates (in Roman) got M (1000) infront of all dates and Jewish an V (5000). So we got 2000 years and 6000 claimed history.

Having written the above it appeared to me this could be an ironic illustration of tribal knowledge vs technical documentation issue. Knowing when something happened and reading about it are two separate things.