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Could you speak to the practical values of a stabilized reference encyclopedia?

If the study of history is a long-term, iterative process, where is this stability important (beyond the filtering of short-term noise, vandalism, political influence, etc)?

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I can see several advantages: -having a "frozen" dataset, meaning that I can work on the same dataset as my colleague -Having all the topics frozen at the same date, representing global knowledge at one point. They knew X and Y, but Z was not advanced yet, so they could not do W. It is hard to realized the concomitance of knowledge bumps on the time scale in a continuously changing encyclopedia.

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