Therefore, you can't drop knowledge. Therefore, it can't fall and hit the floor with the resultant shattering into thousands of individual pieces. Knowledge is an intangible entity. Or, perhaps, the knowledge, unknown to the collector, may have already been broken when it was collected. One of the common reasons given for non-functional knowledge management is that the repository was built to hold knowledge that nobody uses.
Unused knowledge becomes stale and even more unusable.
It does not matter how the knowledge became broken it only matters that the knowledge is no longer useful because it has lost its enabling characteristic. A subset of these practitioners also know that the plant is no longer grown and the active ingredient cannot be synthesized. Although the knowledge concerning the use of the plant to cure the disease is still accurate, it is useless because of a change in circumstances in the environment. Collecting, eRecording, eCapturing, or maintaining broken knowledge is a waste of resources. Therefore, two things are important the ability to recognize broken knowledge and the ability to protect knowledge during the collection process so that it does not end up broken.