Where do I gain knowledge from? Asked the dull man to the wise guy and the wise guy replied “Well, it’s all around you, start collecting it from anything you hear and see. How you make all that knowledge usable is by applying the correct filters to it”. With that intelligent quote the wise man left. You are probably wondering how to apply the right filters to your sea of knowledge as well…
I may have an idea and a sort of shortcut for you to let other people to the heavy lifting for you. Start sharing your knowledge with others as much as you can and their questions/rebuttals will be your filters as they give you the additional perspectives you need. In the eventuality what you have here is creation of knowledge by sharing it and then let others share their back and fostering this culture will lead to more nodes of knowledge about that particular topic.
Google products endeavor to make knowledge sharing possible among its users and to facilitate this they adopt a similar approach of standardization and filtering such that the most common answers (MCA) address the FAQs.
Establishing the above, I wish to share that my contributions as a Google Local Guide are nothing but creation of those nodes by sharing the knowledge and experience I gain by visiting different places and hope to share and answer as many questions (filters created by Google) about those places that may help some users who are you not contributing themselves. This contribution is irrespective of whether others are contributing or not because with enough collective mass of responses, together WE can create credible information. I hope that someday there will be enough widespread awareness of contribution benefits and people will share their honest opinions about places and businesses that may help future consumers.