I have a half-baked idea about an addon that could place unseen new cards in an intelligent order based on shared keywords. For example, imagine a 50,000 card deck that covers topics a huge range of topics, from ancient history, to geography, to pop culture, to hard sciences, to etymology. Now imagine that somebody is coming into the deck cold. They can either review the deck in the order it was made, or they can review it randomly, or they can manually pick and choose which topics/tags to start with (though that would be slow). But what if there was a way they could intelligently tackle the deck by building off of keywords in a web?
For example, say they started by learning a card about Hannibal (the ancient general from Carthage). The addon could intelligently sort the remaining cards into an order that forms a sort of tree, branching out from the keyword “Hannibal” at the center. It might give you a few questions about Hannibal, Missouri, then branch into a few about Mark Twain (famous author from Hannibal). Then a few questions expanding on Twain’s works, and then maybe a few about Hannibal Lector, the character played by Anthony Hopkins in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Then some questions about other films that Anthony Hopkins was in, such as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).” Then some questions about who wrote “Dracula.” Then some about Carthage (the place where Hannibal, the general, was from). Etc. etc., expanding outward in a large web in some intelligent way so that the learner always has some connections between what they’re currently learning and what they already learned!
Sort of like PopUpDictionary, but for generating an intelligent order for new cards.
Without such an addon, leaners don’t have an easy way to intelligently order their cards, and might be stuck receiving a random question about Mark Twain followed by an unconnected question about Aretha Franklin followed by an unconnected question about polar bears. The random and unconnected order of the cards would prevent them from building links between the material in their mind, leaving them less likely to be able to form solid, interlocking memories.
I’m sure this would be a very complicated undertaking. But I can see it being a rewarding one for large premade decks, such as trivia decks that contain a wide assortment of topics. Another example: the Great Works of Art deck would be more accessible if people had an option to start from, say, Raphael and then intelligently branch into other “High Renaissance” (keyword) or “Italian” (keyword) artists, etc. rather than just throwing all the art together somewhat randomly. Maybe even could have useful applications for people learning languages from large decks of sentences, to help them connect new vocabulary words together by seeing them in a variety of different sentences.
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that would let many deck to be ‘opensourcely’ better, better, and so better!