Like in all things I guess "there is more than one way to do it" so I am guessing you will get lots of different answers. I work in publishing and content management is really very important in what we do.

On the product I help to maintain, we have pieces of text which can be modified in either small or big ways. Every time the text is saved back to the database it creates a record of the fact there have been changes to the text with a timestamp (and other data such as the id of the person who made the change).

My viewpoint (coming from an XML background) is that the text is "data" and the other info is "metadata" (data about the data). The text might contain date information in it but this is not the metadata. Data is usually meant to be looked at by humans whereas the metadata is used by scripts, applications, etc.