Yes. I have a BIG IDEA which is in line with the work you have already done.
It will require cooperation with Damien, so please consider sharing some of your generous donation with him to make this happen.
All of us (and humanity at large) would benefit greatly from the development of a more robust market for anki deck sharing.
Imagine, for example, how much we could speed up the rate of innovation to find solutions to difficult problems like cancer, alzheimer’s and COVID-19, for example, if newly discovered knowledge could be more rapidly shared with a larger number of people.
Imagine this future which I believe will come to pass …
1: AnkiWeb as the next generation of Wikipedia
IMHO a decentralized anki deck sharing market will be so heavily utilized that it will replace the now heavily censored Wikipedia and provide a means to subvert the censorship and centralized narrative control.
i.e. Every Wikipedia page can be efficiently converted to a well structured anki deck. If conflicts exist over the content to be included, each creator can have the freedom to fork the content and each user can have the freedom to explore alternative content.
2: Every medical research paper as an anki deck (+ ability to load decks for cited papers)
The failure of information sharing for COVID-19 has arguably led to the unnecessary deaths of millions. Men and women of good conscience should work to ensure that this never happens again.
More so, the perverse incentives at work in academia and industry favor the accumulation of wealth, status and power by big corporations over meeting human needs.
One way to solve this problem is to enable independent researchers to attain a rate of innovation that exceeds the ability of corporations to hinder the rate of innovation with (1) patents and (2) their use of accumulated wealth to buy politicians, media and social media.
Background: Letter | Start a Conversation
3: A premade anki deck for every course offering
The exponentially growing rate of innovation is creating the conditions such that all of us are feeling the pressure to both
(1) learn new things faster and
(2) retain the information that we have already learned with less effort.
This, in turn, is creating the conditions whereby premade anki decks are going to be offered by educators to supplement their existing offerings.
Why will this happen?
Because this would significantly reduce the amount of grunt work required to be done by the student, which would enable them to spend more time actually learning and retaining their subject matter material.
How to make this happen?
The dream of rapid knowledge sharing via the sharing of anki decks is hindered by the pain associated with deck sharing.
What is the origin of that pain?
In order for the deck to render properly, the user needs to have
(1) the correct version of anki and
(2) the correct version of all of the addons.
For example, most of my decks heavily use Glutanimate’s “Cloze Overlapper” addon.
This addon currently only works with the 2.1.26 version of Anki.
This means that, in order for another user to view one of my shared decks, they need to
1: Install the 2.1.26 version of Anki
2: Install the correct version of “Cloze Overlapper” (which requires a Patreon subscription fee)
3: Install the correct version of all of the other addons that I am using.
i.e. The “cost” of deck sharing is too high.
When considering whether to take an action, humans make a cost/benefit calculation.
Most of the time, the potential “benefit” of loading a shared deck does not outweigh the “cost” of the hoops you have to jump through to load that deck correctly.
But what if
(1) the requirements (anki kernel version + anki addon versions) were contained within the shared deck in a machine readable fashion
For example, like a python pip requirements file.
AND
(2) we had an addon / core anki feature which could
(a) read these requirements and
(b) automatically load the correct versions of the anki kernel + addons to render the deck.
This would significantly lower the “cost” of deck sharing and, in so doing, create conditions more favorable to the emergence of a market for deck sharing.
This is in line with the excellent work that the AnKing team has already done on the Butler addon.
Readers who are not familiar with this excellent product should check it out here:
Info:
Sorry. New users are limited to 2 links per post
Download (by anki version):
Sorry. New users are limited to 2 links per post
P.S. IMHO the Cloze Overlapper addon is an extraordinary innovation. I have made several feature requests here:
There are, of course, still other barriers which hinder the emergence of a robust market for deck sharing.
IMHO, these include:
1: Inadequate ability to order subdecks & cards within a deck
The inability to order subdecks and cards within the deck unless the deck names are prepended with numbers.
It is difficult to guide the user through the order in which subdecks should be explored without the ability to order the decks.
But the “cost” of ordering is too high if it requires renumbering deck names every time a new subdeck is ordered.
2: The absence of deck dependency specifications
In order to “understand” the concepts contained within a deck, it is necessary to understand the prerequisite concepts.
Currently, I am unaware of any means by which to LINK to the other decks which contain these concepts.
If this feature existed, the “deck creator” could simply add URLs to the missing concepts and the “deck users” could simply load the prerequisite concepts necessary to understand the current concept they are struggling to understand.
3: Insufficient support for decentralization
Although there are no barriers to prevent the loading of either addons or decks from non-centralized locations, the ability to load either by URL, and the ability of the deck creator to specify dependent addons and decks by URL would significantly increase the conditions favorable towards the development of a robust decentralized deck sharing market.
4: Lack of a deck diff/patch tools
Programmers will be familiar with the diff and patch tools. The diff tool allow 2 source code files to be compared in order to see the difference between them. The patch tool enables diff-based patches to be submitted and reviewed for inclusion.
Patches to the linux kernel, for example, are submitted in this fashion.
The ability to do a deck diff & patch would significantly increase conditions favorable to the development of a robust deck sharing market.
Why?
For “deck users”:
It would, in part, allow for deck enhancements to be loaded in a fashion such that the user could be alerted to them so that they could be reviewed and scheduled according to the individual user’s needs.
For “deck creators”:
It would enable teams of creators to collaborate on decks using the same set of software tools that are used to collaborate on open source projects and to share their collaborations on github, gitlab, bitbucket, etc.
5: The lack of easy dana for creators
Dana is the Buddhist term for generosity.
The ability to offer donations to creators of addons and shared decks (and the core anki team: Thank you Damien. We are so grateful for Anki.), would significantly increase conditions favorable to the development of deck sharing. I would strongly suggest that this be done via cryptocurrency. Preferably with bitcoin. Preferably with satoshis on the lightning network.
Ideally, I would imagine loading a shared deck and seeing a popup listing all of the creators who contributed to making this offering possible (the deck creators, the dependent deck creators, the addon creators and the dependent addon creators) and a suggested donation of satoshis to each that can be simply clicked, or edited and clicked, for the funds to be instantly transferred on the lightning network.
Thank you for your consideration.