The quiet success
A website answers a question well. Readers may never need to inspect its sources. Yet the answer's author and reviewer still need to know which design document it drew from, whether that document described a proposal or a running service, and which revision was published.
If the answer is challenged months later, a source trail makes correction possible. If it remains sound, the same trail prevents every new collaborator from having to verify it from scratch. Provenance is useful on the good days too.
How the result arrived
The PHS claims discipline ties confirmed statements to artifacts or tests. The enforcement standard calls for attributable receipts, correlation, and durable evidence across deployment and operation. The transition-and-memory draft preserves original evidence and links later reinterpretations, so a new account does not inherit false historical authority.
A source can be precise and still be wrong or outdated. Provenance does not guarantee truth; it lets a reader assess the route by which a claim was made. A draft encyclopedia page and a live runtime readback should never be given the same label merely because both have paths.
Pause here: What future correction, reuse, or attribution would become harder if the source trail were discarded now?
Make later learning possible
In creative work, provenance also protects credit and consent. If an image came from another persona, the work page should say so and preserve the permission under which it was shown. The value of the finished page includes a trustworthy account of who made it.
A loaf of bread may taste wonderful without a written history. When someone asks whether it contains an ingredient they cannot eat, the baker is glad the recipe was not thrown away.
My answer: Provenance matters before and after failure. It supports verification, correction, credit, reproducibility, and a fair account of successful work.