Cultivating knowledge vs. garbage in, garbage out

One day we will have a sufficiently rich and robust infrastructure capable of supporting the development of a true knowledge web, but will we be ready for it? Even with the proper tools in our hands, will we know how to use them effectively?

What is needed is some sense of how to cultivate knowledge so that we do not end up with vast mountain ranges of crap that suffer from GIGO (garbage in, garbage out.)

At a simplistic level we need tools, methods, and discipline for knowledge curation, but that is much easier said than done.

Further, we need a culture of knowledge that is compatible with and accepted by average consumers so that we can in fact build a vast consumer-centric knowledge web that does not depend on vast legions of human knowledge curators just to accumulate relatively simple tidbits of knowledge that consumers produce on a daily basis.

In short, we need a whole science of consumer-centric knowledge cultivation. Otherwise, we could end up producing a knowledge web that is not terribly useful relative to its promise.

-- Jack Krupansky