I missed the short little blurbs about the importance of certian characters and places that were less than 200 words.

I hated with a passion the 4000 word essays that explained plot that should have been shown through quests and quest text.

In Cataclysm, they did say they were going to try showing rather than telling. Since they might be playing with cutting back on quest text, they could put it into something like this instead, showing importance and backstory for events and locations rather than just 'get this item' and a sentence about why they need it.

Wow is generally fairly concise with its information, and if they included some lore it would be short and sweet, or at least be divided into separate categories. The most important thing is you can likely access the Tome from anywhere and in game, in wow you have to alt tab to wowwiki to see the importance. We need a good consolidated database for lore that's official, or at least looked over. Wowwiki's good for casual lore, but just the fact that it's a wiki makes it questionable.