In defense of Insertion order: Random

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I am a longtime user of New card Insertion order: Random – so long that I don’t even notice the warning message anymore. Since, it’s worded so mildly (“it is better …”), compared to other warning messages, I’m not sure I even took it that seriously to begin with! :sweat_smile:
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But the question comes up from time-to-time – What’s the problem with Insertion order: Random?

Does anyone know why that warning was introduced with the v3 scheduler? What’s the serious downside that we are being warned away from? Or if it’s not that serious, can we remove the warning that besmirches the good name of our dear Insertion order: Random?

I care about this because as far as I can tell, there is no other way to get the workflow that I want – which seems like a common enough setup for language learning. (Or is this more of a niche case than I think it is? :sweat_smile: I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on that too!)

I have a healthy stock of New and suspended-New cards that I am working through (from an imported Frequency deck). When I come across new vocab in-the-wild, I find the note, correct it if needed, and unsuspend it. If it’s not there, I might add it as a new note.

For the newly-unsuspended and the newly-created, it is usually good to introduce those sooner rather than later. But other than that, and having the higher frequency words unsuspended first – I don’t much care what order the words are introduced. On top of that, I definitely want to avoid having words I added around the same time introduced around the same time. I need that variety to keep distance between words related to the same topic, words with similar roots, etc.

To get that workflow, I pair Insertion order: Random, with Gather order: anything non-random (Deck, Ascending, Descending), which gives me 2 unique benefits –

  1. My New-queue has a “sooner” and a “later.” When I want cards introduced sooner, I can push them towards the “front” with Reposition. I can’t do that with any of the random Gather orders.
  2. My sibling cards are introduced close-in-time to each other. With sibling burying turned on, any random Gather order means there is no way to know when the other siblings will be introduced. But with a non-random Gather, my New siblings wait around patiently at the “front” of the queue until the coast is clear (of earlier siblings).

I find it hard to believe that Anki doesn’t want me to have all that! :face_holding_back_tears:

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I didn’t read your post fully, but I think that the following answers your query:

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As the reason for the warning? The bad that we’re avoiding is that the randomness will be statistically slightly less random?

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Re: Insertion order

Apart from what vaibhav added, iirc insertion order doesn’t allow you to switch between the two options easily.

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Do most people actually want random to be truly random? Think the shuffle feature in music players. I remember hearing Apple actually used to make it random and people would complain after hearing music from the same artist/album multiple times.

edit: Oh, sorry I misread. It seems the problem is in fact being less random and not more randomness minimising distance between similar cards.

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I am not sure if this is the only reason for the warning but it is definitely one of the reasons.

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It can be much more than slightly if you’re consistently adding new cards while introducing others - it can get to the point where newly-added cards are much more likely to appear near the start, and some users found they need to periodically switch the order back and forth to re-randomize.

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Related in GitHub: