[gojomo]

Agreed, bulk collection gets dominated by crap, which individually has little value.

But there's some absolutely essential priceless diamonds hidden in the crap. And they can't be found/known at the time of collection: only with the future development of other events & knowledge do they become retroactively evident. So you've got to collect & preserve as much as you practically can, or else great things are lost forever.

Further, even the mounds/magnitudes of crap can turn out to be important for understanding the past. Ads that annoyed readers at the time help communicate how people, & businesses, & technology were really operating – not just the self-serving stories people craft later. The most-fumbling and awkward early uses of a new medium – hypertext, or RealAudio, or Shockwave Flash, or whatever – reveal enduring lessons about the evolution of technology & culture, including roads-not-taken that could still hold promise.

This shouldn't surprise us. Much of what we know of past civilizations comes from archeologists studying trash dumps that, via dumb luck, were well-preserved.

So if you tell me, "the Wayback Machine is a giant unedited trash heap of the internet", my response is: "Yes! That's the point! You get it!"