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The point of a card sort is to figure out what mental modal your users have of the information you're presenting, before they see the site. The main thing it lets you do is to avoid the frustration of not finding the foo section under the bar section, when that's obviously where it should be. If all your users put foo in 'don't know' then that tells you ...

I've just done a little quick and dirty analysis on the OptimalSort database for you. Eyeballing some of the instructions messages suggests that most studies are not prompting the use of a "don't know" group. So I've counted the number of participants who did anyway using the following criteria: ... where label REGEXP '(don\'t|dont|misc|confus|not ...

It's a question of costs and risks. Which is worse: users getting an incentive without really trying, or false data being taken during research and becoming misread as "official user feedback"? I'd suggest the latter. Forcing categorisation means participants create weak categories just for the sake of including miscellaneous items. That means weak silos ...

Would it be a bad idea to allow them to define groups instead of using the Don't know group? This way, you get them to help with the categorization of cards and then you can use newly created groups to help other users who don't know what how to group their cards. 'Don't know' is fine but I would imagine that someone will have to step in behind someone ...