[WikiEN-l] Knol is dead (2007-2012); Re: 2 years & 9 months later, Re: 6 months later: Knol update

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, it was pretty abrupt. See Jason Scott on this issue and how it
> wasn't even announced but buried in some obscure Yahoo documentation
> entry.

Google to its credit didn't bury the death notice in help, but they
didn't exactly highlight it:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html

> Knol—We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.

That's surprisingly harsh - when I looked through past shut-downs (
http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20and%20Knol#knol-death-watch ), Google
seemed to usually preserve *public* material as static files. But in
this case, they seem to be saying the Knol content will be completely
purged off their servers.

(Which is a good lesson that Jason Scott would also appreciate,
anyway, about trusting the cloud with your content. Not that trusting
your content to Wikipedia is much better, from the long-term point of
view.)

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net