Dear friends, knowledge is for people and people are for knowledge. This is the complete circle or combination.
Knowledge=observation, hypothesis, verification by experimentation or proof and proving.
Anyone who talks sense regarding a matter is knowledgeable about it.
Coming to educational institutional qualifications, they are not universally recognized yet but human brain and senses and personal experience are a universally recognized sources of knowledge. All human knowledge came from people because they gathered it and passed it down their generations.
There is difference between information and knowledge. Information is mere data and knowledge is combination of information that is put together to make sense in some way. If it does then it is knowledge otherwise it is not rather it remains just a piece of information that makes no sense.
This is why if a person has managed to put certain amount of information together in a sensible way that you cannot find any holes in it then it is a proper combination of information otherwise not. It matters not this combination comes from a child or adult.
So knowledge of a person proves him aalim and ignorance of a person proves him ignorant. Institutional qualifications are useful to some degree but they are not proof in themselves that one is talking sense about something. Only proof of talking sense proves one sensible not his institutional qualifications.
Those who emphasis that we should not listen to anyone other than institutionally qualified, we need to look at them with suspicion because they must have reason to stop us from what they do not want us to know.
It is possible they are concerned for our safety but it could be equally possible that they want to make fool of us and want us to remain that way so that we do not become aware of it by listening to some body else who knows their game.
This is especially true about mullas=priestly class. If we read the quran political and religious of kufaar, mushrikeen and people of the book all told their follower not to listen to prophets of God. They knew that if they would listen to them then they will be found out and their game will be over.
The quran is full of statements telling people to judge the truth of matters for themselves regardless of any recognized institutional qualifications. The sense of judgement is given to all and information and its putting together are only things that people need to do themselves.
The final messenger of Allah put forth the quran in front of people for their judgement as a statement of Allah to see for themselves if his claim was true or false.
Only people who decided to judge it, benefited and the rest perished and the process continues.
So if anyone wants to be right and wants to keep oneself right then one must not listen to any fatwa baaz mulla regarding islam instead one should listen to all sides of argument and have the fullest possible picture before oneself and then come to a conclusion yet remain open for any new evidence that may come along.
We humans can never be certain about our judgement from the beginning to the end because our knowledge changes with time. We knew less when we were children but more after growing up. Had we stuck to our judgements made during childhood we will be in trouble.
So a human being must never be afraid of learning new things otherwise a person is worse than animals because even animals experiment with knew ideas.
Coming to islam, it is good idea to listen to ulema of all sects as well as fatwa baaz mullas but make up your own mind by collecting the best arguments you can from anywhere that make you comfortable with their truth.
regards and all the best.