The origin of #MWStudyFacts
On 6 May 2010, I coined a phrase. Okay, not a phrase, but a word. Alright, not a word, but that lowest common denominator of communication, a hashtag: #MWStudyfacts.
Granted, it's not likely to make the trending charts, but for MW students around the world, it has proved enduring and useful. Since I started it, there have been well over 1,000 tweets tagged with #MWStudyfacts. My objective was to provide content that fellow MW candidates would find useful - either a self-contained snippet of information:
Or links to a much larger resources:
When I was studying for the theory exams, I was producing loads of tweets:
Five years later, most of them are out of date and of limited value to today's students. Thankfully, plenty of us are sharing our current finds using the hashtag. A few people even hijack #MWStudyfacts, providing links to irrelevant or self-promotional content, which is slightly annoying but as good an endorsement of a hashtag as any.
I've got a Tweetdeck column set up so that I see every #MWStudyFacts tweet. I try to curate them by retweeting everything that's useful, and ignoring the questionable ones. It's gratifying to see that it is still going strong, and I wanted to blog about it to encourage whoever might not know about it to tune in. Here's a link to the Twitter search page, where you can scroll through every #MWStudyfacts ever tweeted, and next time you find something useful and wine-related, use the hashtag. It can be your good deed for the day.