This is a post that I wrote on facebook, but I would like to ask that you share this with your friends on facebook or other social media, feel free to rewrite or link to this thread, what I want out is the statement about saving information.

I kindly ask you all, that you carefully consider and think about all the websites you have used to learn about electronics, all the forums you have trawled through for information and the vast amount of videos on youtube that has helped you understand and solve a problem.

This information only exists because there are people wanting to let the information live on, from user to user, open platforms like personal websites and forums are indexed and made searchable by almost any search engine on the internet. Imagine if all you ever found on google was closed facebook profiles and no information.

This is a circle of information sharing that has been broken, the eco system of knowledge sharing is dying with social media.

Only uploading pictures of your experiment with a short sentence or “science!” is destroying the electronics hobby, if you value what you have learned on the internet, then give it back to the internet, make your own website or, less time consuming, write a good long thread on a forum about the technical issues you had and how it was solved.

Do not worry about if you think that your english is not good enough, do not fear that you make yourself look inexperienced, so would I in many fields of science and there is no way that I master every aspect of electronics. Ask, Learn and Help each other!

There is a generation gap right now, 20 years ago everyone shared their knowledge on mailing lists or had a html website, next leap came with the blogs where focus could be moved to creating content and not maintaining code, but with social media, all control, history and indexing is gone. There is no information left for the future generations, because it is all posted on closed social media groups. Content is mixed, unorganized and for the most lost for the user after a couple of weeks, way down the stream.

Fight the loss of knowledge! Make a website or post on a forum! Only use social media to link to your website/forum post. This is the only way for the information to live on.

I hope you will share this call to arms with like minded electronics interested people.

Kind regards
Mads Barnkob
Administrator of http://www.highvoltageforum.net
Author of http://www.kaizerpowerelectronics.dk
Moderator of http://www.4hv.org
User of eevblog.com forum and diyaudio.com forum