Deleting

Deleting is permanent. Consider unpublishing instead.

Deleting knols, reviews or collections

You can delete a page you own at any time. Click on the Settings link, then go to the Unpublish/Delete tab , and then choose Delete Knol or Delete Collection. This will delete the knol, review or collection along with all previous versions of it. Keep in mind that you will not be able to recover it once you have deleted it, and you will lose the images you uploaded into the knol. So use this feature carefully.
 
Step one: click on "Settings" 
Click on the image to expand
 
Step two: go to the "Unpublish / Delete" tab
Click on the image to expand 
 
If all you want to do is make your work invisible to the public, you can do this simply by unpublishing it. You (and your co-owners, co-authors or co-moderators, if applicable) will still be able to see and edit your work while it is unpublished, but it will not be accessible to other users.

Before you delete, please repair broken links

If other pages link to your knol, review or collection, those links will be broken by the removal of your page. You can find the list of such pages by clicking on the link: Search for uses of this page which is found on the right hand side below the Also Wrote and Related Knols lists. If the knols which link to the to-be-deleted page are yours, or in open or moderated collaboration modes, you can fix them directly.


FAQs about deleting

I have deleted my knol, review or collection by accident, is there a recycle bin I can recover it from?

No. Once you have deleted it, it is gone for good.

If you share ownership of your work with another author, be sure you are comfortable with the fact that they, or any person they share ownership with, has the ability to permanently delete your content.
 

I am an author of this knol, but I can't seem to delete it?

You have to be the owner of a knol in order to delete it. Co-authors cannot delete knols they don't own.

I am a moderator of this collection, but I can't seem to delete it?

You have to be the owner of a collection in order to delete it. Co-moderators cannot delete knols they don't own. 

Can I delete specific past versions?

No. You can unpublish past versions, but those remain visible to yourself, to other owners and authors/moderators and to system administrators.
 
If you must delete a past version -- if for example you are using shared ownership or authorship and the document contained private personal information such as phone numbers, addresses, account numbers or passwords -- then:
  • create a new knol, review or collection, making sure it contains only the information you want to keep publicly visible.
  • invite the persons you want to share ownership or authorship with
  • delete the old page.

You will have lost the history of past revisions and comments on the knol, but that may be an acceptable price to pay to protect private information.

 

Why is there still evidence that a knol, review or collection once existed, even after I delete it?

 When you delete something, but then revisit its url, you may be presented by a message such as:
 
This knol has been deleted 
 
The knol you have requested has been deleted by one of its owners.
  
If users had previously linked to the work, it enables them to understand that it has explicitly been deleted and is not absent due to some other factor such as a server error or data loss.
 
 

When I delete a knol, review or collection, are all copies of it immediately removed?

  • Deletions should take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted may take some time to be removed from our active servers, and may remain in our offline backup systems.
  • Links to deleted pages may temporarily remain in some knol lists, such as "Related Knols", "Similar Content", or "Also Wrote". Anyone following these links will encounter a message indicating that the page has been deleted.
  • If it had been published, it is possible that third parties may have made copies of it, through archival copies of the entire Web, through mirroring of knol.google.com, or through individual actions such as cutting-and-pasting your content onto a blog. Such copies are not under our control and are in no way affected by deletion.
  • If it was published, it may have been crawled by search engines, which may retain cached copies of partial or whole documents in their indexes. It is common for such residual copies to remain for many days; each search engine has its own policies and procedures for handling the removal of content.

Can I delete my knol, review or collection just by removing all of its content?

No. That just leaves you with an empty document -- which will get bad ratings and hurt your reputation as an author. All of the original content is still visible in the past revisions. Instead unpublish it or delete it.

Comments


D.S. Thanatos

The deleted items are still in "my knols"

i don't care that there is an message in the old url, but can't tolerance they still exist in the "my knols" page. whatever i choose "published" or "unpublished", there are those deleted knols. It's a much confusion for me to manage my knols, 'cause I don't know which is the useful item. I'll thank you so much if you can solve this.

Last edited Jun 24, 2009 9:49 AM
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Murry Shohat

No Settings Button

Allright, I've been searching for my Settings button for 20 minutes. I give up. Please help

Murry

Last edited May 12, 2009 3:27 PM
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C. Albert

Why must a deleted knol still be visible?

I deleted my knol and now it is still visible. I deleted in only because I was having problems with the formatting of my link. Is there anyway to make a deleted knol invisible to the publlic?

Last edited Nov 28, 2008 12:40 PM
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Mike90

Ability to Delete Is Problematic

The ability to delete knols without an openly accessible archival record is problematic. This feature means that knols can never be cited in academic work. Knols can't be cited because an author can't be assured that readers will be able to access the cited work. Citation (building on the work of others) it at the heart of academic research. In fact, given that knols are ephemeral, they should probably not be referenced by journalists or bloggers. Even Wikipedia provides an archival record. The decision of Google to allow deleting is a serious mistake.

Last edited Jul 30, 2008 8:46 PM
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