The topic of my senior thesis for my history degree was that history is the study of the world through metadata (in contrast to physicalism which says that scie

The topic of my senior thesis for my history degree was that history is the study of the world through metadata (in contrast to physicalism which says that science is the study of the world through data). I used Wikipedia as an example since the prevailing wisdom is that you cannot use it as a primary source. I argued that the metadata such as the edit history and talk pages constituted a legitimate primary source. For instance, if we wanted to argue that a certain topic is controversial (e.g. the administration of George W. Bush), we could look at the velocity of edits (especially undos) and the discussion on the Talk page.