On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> 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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
