“Darwin spent five years sailing in a small boat, Galileo defied the Pope, and Madame Curie handled radioactive materials, all in pursuit of knowledge as the most profound of human goals. That is what knowledge meant in our culture, and it has little to do with the middle layer of a made up pyramid that shears knowledge of all but its most prosaic, get-‘er-done utility.

Despite this, the DIKW pyramid gets one thing very right about how we’ve thought about knowledge. Our most basic strategy for understanding a world that far outruns our brain’s capacity has been to filter, winnow, and otherwise reduce it to something more manageable…. Knowledge has been about reducing what we need to know…

It’s the connecting of knowledge—the networking—that is changing our oldest, most basic strategy of knowing. Rather than knowing-by-reducing to what fits in a library or a scientific journal, we are now knowing-by-including every draft of every idea in vast, loosely connected webs. “–David Weinberger, Too Big To Know, 2011