In wulin, every sect hopes to leave a glorious legacy. Of course, the best way to do this is to have your sect be among the most powerful in wulin, generation after generation. If that can't be accomplished, then the next best thing would be to pass on a powerful martial arts technique that would continue to bring glory to the sect's name for posterity, even if the sect itself ceases to exist.
Clearly, legacy meant a great deal to wulin sects and their leaders. That being the case, why did so few of them record an accurate and exhaustive history of their sect? We know that Yeung Siu wrote a fairly detailed history of the Ming Cult, but many major wulin sects did not have an authoritative history. Take the Beggar's Union, for example. By the time of LOCH, the Beggar's Union elders didn't have a clear take on the details of former Union Chief Kiu Fung, who had lived one-hundred years earlier. I bet that by the time of Union Chief Shih For Lung in HSDS, the members of the Beggar's Union didn't even know whom Kiu Fung was (few of them probably even knew much about the relatively more recent Hung 7 Gung). Similarly, when the Cheun Jen Sect ceased to exist as a wulin power after ROCH, few people from the HSDS or later generations knew anything about the sect's wulin accomplishments, despite the sect's founder having once been recognized for decades as wulin's top martial artist and the sect itself being the most prominent in wulin for a period of seventy years. Members die, sect unity breaks down, and perhaps martial arts skills fail to get passed on to posterity, but if any of these sects had a historian to record its major milestones, their legacies might not have been completely lost to future generations.