Context
Hi! I’m using Anki to help my children (aged 10, 10 and 13) to study all things they need to know by heart for school. In Flanders, this means e.g.:
- Dutch (mother tongue) vocabulary
- from 10 onwards, French vocabulary
- from 13 onwards, English vocabulary
And next to that, things like countries and capitals, historical dates, etc.
The thing is, the decks I create are based on what the kids need to know according to their books. Sometimes there’s additional content from the teacher, but most of the content is derived from the books. This means that the decks I create would actually be useful / reusable to all kids that are using these books.
Now, there are only like 3 publishers for school books here. That means these decks could be reusable for 1/3 of the school-going population.
With the existing functionality, I can distribute these decks to other parents (which I do, they’re on github) and they can import them in Anki and make use of them. However, I’m only human, so the decks I create might have mistakes in them - typo’s, some word that I accidentally skipped, etc. When another parent notices and fixes the mistake, they do so within their own deck - it isn’t reflected back to mine, unless if they re-export and let me know. And then I would need to redistribute to all other users. That’s a hassle, and as open source writers, you know there’s 98% users and 2% contributors - most parents don’t even bother sending me a fix.
Actual feature request
I would like to be able to more easily work together with other Anki users towards creating and maintaining reusable high quality decks.
As to the implementation, I’m thinking: let’s support using a repository. That way, the content of the decks is open source, anyone can reuse it, anyone can contribute.
- Ultimate solution: support for a new Deck type, for which the user configures an address (to a folder in a repository), and which then gets the notes from there. At startup / sync, the application would then check if there are updates in that repo / repo folder and update the local collection if needed. Updates to the local deck would be automatically pushed as PR’s to the repo.
- Intermediate step, but already usable by itself: support for a new export/import format, which exports a deck into a repo-usable file or set of files.
Wrt. (2), I know notes can be exported to text format (with IDs) - but that seems geared towards importing in Excel-like solutions. It doesn’t include media or media references (for cloze cards), etc.
Instead, we’d need something like an xml or json file, which either includes or reference the media files. Something that is more easily parsable for a repo (and for PRs).