I need to see how other Anki users design their cards to get inspiration and guidance on how I could design my own. Things how like they’re worded, structured etc.
So I wonder, is there way to download all shared Anki decks? Perhaps there is a data dump or a GitHub repository that contains all these decks? Alternatively, is there a way to search for a specific term or tag across all shared decks? For example I could want to see how other users have designed cards about Mathematical derivatives, Python decorators or higher order functions. I can’t scrape ankiweb for obvious reasons.
At this point as nobody came forward, I’m thinking that what I’m seeking doesn’t exist. Consequently, and considering I’m under pressure to come with a solution to my study, I’m left with devising a strategy to download all or most of the decks in a way that doesn’t overload the server, as this seems to be the only solution possible for me. If you have anything to suggest before I start working on it (tomorrow) then let me know.
I would strongly recommend you not try to download all the decks from AnkiWeb. For one, that seems like unnecessary traffic to put on the AnkiWeb servers. But also, so many decks shared on AnkiWeb are not worth your time. I don’t think there are a lot of “undiscovered gems” out there.
If you search for the terms you’re looking for, the highest ranked decks are the most likely to be useful for you. When you get past the first few, you’re not going to find a lot of novel card design. You’ll be surprised how many shared decks are just “Basic” note types (not even renamed), even including duplicate reversed notes (instead of sensibly using a “Basic-and-reversed” note type). I think you can tell pretty quickly from a shared deck’s page how much effort the author might have put into the deck.
Thanks for chiming in. It’s true, most cards are going to be low-quality but the search could be improved in my opinion, like I would like to find decks by specific keywords or tags but they might not be tagged as such for different reasons.
By the way I too have “Basic” note type (among with specialized ones) not renamed because it does its job and used where “Basic-and-reversed” would not fit the job. But I customized the design to look nice and be efficient (it has context for instance). Let’s say it’s 80% “Basic-and-reversed” and 20% “Basic” because most things can be reversed but then going into details requires questions and can’t or are pointless to make into “Basic-and-reversed”. I have like “Basic-and-reversed” ones that go “term” → “definition” and then often have “Basic” ones that go “Why is definition x?” → “answer” or “What if definition x instead of y yadda yadda?” → “answer”.
This is partly my point. Well-made decks – decks you might like to copy from – are also more likely to be named and described in thoughtful and well-considered ways, so that they can be found in a search. You’re supposing a wonderful deck out there that was created and posted by someone who couldn’t put together a useful and informative description. It’s not completely impossible, but I’ve never seen it!
I should clarify – I wasn’t trying to suggest there’s anything wrong with using a Basic note type! It’s a great note type for everything that it fits.
My shade was thrown toward deck-creators who modify the note type without renaming it, and then publish it – thoughtlessly casting yet another indistinguishable “Basic +++…” or “Basic-sd4f6s” note type into users’ collections. Users have to tolerate that, or invest their own time and effort to clean it up. It’s a big pet-peeve of mine.
Uhm yeah you may be right here. After all the same effort you put into crafting nice cards can be crafted into using the right words, tags etc. Well I think I’ve made nice cards myself after a lot of tinkering but I write like crap because I’m constantly tired, but it’s still a forum post which is not same thing as a shared deck where you have ample time to think and come back to improve it.
Ohhh that’s what you meant!! Yeah that kind of thing is very bad and it doesn’t take much to come up with better names. There’s no excuse for that.
