I’ve heard the phrase “where information / knowledge goes to die“ applied to a variety of targets: email, wikis, various software products, even governments. But I wasn’t sure where it originated.
A chain of blog links led me to a 2003 blog post by Bill French titled Transforming Information into Knowledge at the Portal, which is credited with coining the phrase “e-mail is where knowledge goes to die.”
Appropriately, the blog is no longer online, so I found it on the Internet Archive.
I didn’t find any older references. So there you go. Information has been dying at least since 2003.