Rename review limit

Anki Suggestions
41

I don’t think there’s an anecdotal-“most” that would be meaningful. There are millions of Anki users, and the help-seekers and help-givers I encounter are a pretty small slice. I don’t think anyone should generalize from that.

I’m using this one real user in a situation that really came up today merely as an example. But the greater point is that this change gives muddled information to people who do pay attention to and rely on the documentation. It moves the needle in the wrong direction, because even if this change makes it less confusing for you, that doesn’t mean it’s going to make it less confusing for anyone else. I think the dozens of messages in this thread trying to clarify what you’re asking for and why are an indicator that this isn’t an obvious or clarifying change.

Yes, I know that your changes are targeting an agenda. There’s nothing wrong with that per se – but I don’t think there’s a consensus around your ideas of what should and should not be included, or what is and is not generally understood.

As I pointed out in my answer to that user – intraday learning cards are already included in a limit, specifically in the New card limit on the day they are introduced. Even if they hang around another day, it doesn’t make sense to count them again in a daily Review limit.

42

I don’t disagree, I say test in a release, and revert later if needed.

Just to be clear, that word “agenda” is an extremely negative word at least where I live. I feel uncomfortable it being used for my suggestion.

In a daily review limit that includes new cards and learning cards with 1d or more steps. It could be argued new cards shouldn’t be included there but it was done nevertheless. If new cards should be limited by number of review cards why not intraday learning cards too?

43

Focusing on the current situation, the “Maximum cards/day” is seemingly easy to understand but actually false as an expression for the current actual limit number, I think. To this possibly-tricky kind of issue, keeping the suggested changes and waiting and seeing whether or not people complain would not be appropriate approaches.

For one thing,

I think this thought is applied to the “Maximum cards/day”.
It is not appropriate to call the current “Maximum reviews/day” “Maximum cards/day”, as even if ignoring some issue about intraday learning cards, the “Maximum cards/day” may not include new cards.

I guess it will be worthwhile to continue exploring for valid ways for improvement about the current descriptions in the released versions, but the suggested changes related to this topic are inappropriate, in my opinion.

It is appropriate to keep the descriptions of the released versions instead of keeping the suggested changes, I think.

1 Like
44

sigh @dae do what you wish.

edit: I just wish people said it earlier if they have such strong opinion against this. I am still not sure an average anki user will look at cards, halfway already gone through learning steps, and will be less capable of understanding that the limit is treating them differently.

45

You should not be proposing, and Anki should not be releasing changes that muddle information. If where you landed is – I want it to change, but I can’t think of how to change it to make it better, so let’s change it to make it worse and see how it goes – then more discussion is needed.

It’s not meant negatively. Targeting an agenda is only negative if it is for negative purposes. Is there a phrase you would you prefer – working toward a goal, implementing an overall plan? You often mention that changes you are proposing are steps toward something else that you want to propose. That is what I mean by “targeting an agenda.”

I think I answered that already. Because (1) it’s not good for learning to limit those at all, and (2) they have already been counted in a limit (while New cards have not).

46

I’m sorry I meant to say, it’s hard to come to a conclusion from that example, so I proposed “wait and see”. I now don’t much care if this is reverted or not. I’ll leave it up to dae.

I know but you could’ve phrased it differently, maybe phrase it how I phrase. Or use the word “we” instead of “you” which is not uncommon even when the later is meant.

I only remember saying it once here and once in load balancer’s case.

I just find this idea a bit paternalistic given that users have control over the limit.

I believe new cards get counted in the new card limit, which is another maximum limit (cards don’t accumulate).

In any case, I don’t have much to add to the conversation besides what I’ve already said. I do think I can better the tooltips in the original review limit but that would be a different issue.

47

I am happy to revert if that’s where the majority falls. Perhaps it would be worth @sorata and @Danika_Dakika summarising their arguments in one reasonably-sized paragraph each, and then throwing them in a poll in a new topic, linking back to this one for interested parties?

1 Like
48

Sure, we can do that. We’ll hammer out some text in DMs.

49

I would be more interested in the poll if people gave their subjective opinions instead of trying to guess each other’s responses, which is what would happen in this case. I’m also a bit less passionate about this now because:

  1. It seems adding intraday cards isn’t possible.

  2. I think one of the main problems with “review limit” was that it equated reviews with review cards. I was looking at the wrong interpretation of it, which I didn’t realise until recently. I believe in trying to provide a succinct description we have made it more confusing. If the tooltips are improved we can do without a name change.

50

In that case, it sounds like we won’t be doing a summaries/poll post, so you don’t need to wait for that to show up.

51

Ok, I will revert the change.

1 Like
52

(You missed two other PRs; I have pinged you on GH)

I have a rough idea for an alternate description of review limit:

"This option limits the number of reviews you can do per day.

By default, the review limit affects all cards except cards with intervals less than a day."

I believe this is better as —

  1. It doesn’t conflate the word reviews with review cards.
  2. It doesn’t use the word maximum as it might give people the wrong impression of what this option does.
  3. Instead of focusing on what the limit includes, we tell users what the limit excludes.
  4. Replace the word intraday with a better description.

I have also removed information about how the gathering affects the limits’ working which I believe is better suited for the manual. The tooltips don’t need to tell users everything.

53

I don’t have strong feelings here. If nobody objects, please submit a PR in a few days.

1 Like
54

For now, I think “review(s)” in the broad sense can’t and shouldn’t arbitrarily exclude intraday learning cards or new cards.

“In default, ‘reviews’ includes studying of new cards and interday learning cards and review cards, but not include studying of intraday learning cards. Also, not include studying of new cards when a certain option is enabled” - it seems to be too arbitrary and make less sense for the wording, “reviews”.

I suspect that that wording could also be a seed of another kind of confusions.

55

Better is better than best. I have provided concrete reasons why this is an improvement. I can’t provide anything that counters “this is confusing”. Do you have something you wouldn’t say is confusing?

(edit: also you’re being unfair to the description by changing it completely. the feature is confusing, there is a limit to how much clarity I can provide, which depends on what I say and also what I don’t say. I can use the “reviews” meaning and can write a very confusing prose if you wish but we can also aim for the opposite.)

56

To put it shortly, my point is whether it is better or not.
For now, I suspect the suggested change is not better than keeping the current expression.

My question is not whether the suggested change is the best i.e. perfectly not-confusing but whether it is better i.e. relatively less confusing than the current contents of Anki.

And my current concern is not so much mere “this is confusing” as that the change would be relatively more confusing than the current contents.

This concern focuses on the validity of the policy to interpret “review/reviews” in the certain broader but limited meaning.

(The provided reasons for the suggested change may be good ingenuity for better explanation based on one policy (or universal readability), but they doesn’t seem to reason the validity of the policy itself.)

In the concern, by the policy, the meaning of the “review/reviews” at the options would become more arbitrary, and the arbitrary new meaning would be introduced in Anki as the 3rd (or another greater number) definition of “review/reviews” in the terminology. It would likely cause more meaning-collisions with the other “review/reviews” in the other options, Statistics, and so on.

If, as such, the suggested change would cause more confusions than the current expression does, keeping the current one would be better, I think.

57

I am not a native English speaker. I might have gotten some things wrong, but I hope not. (The text was really confusing).

I’ll be glad to present my points then!

Is this “exclusions make things confusing” stance? I seriously don’t understand how is this the case. People even use mnemonics with, what I’ll call, exclusionary exceptions.

This paragraph took me some time. I think
believing in this leads to absurd conclusions. There is certainly a disconnect between the word maximum and something that is truly not maximum, and I’m optimising for comprehensiblilty, rather than that. But I don’t think we will add a new entry to the mental dictionary of our users. If I were to believe in your assumptions to be true, I would know approx. a thousand definitions of what percentage means, given that percentages in financial contexts often have a lot of exceptions. (E.g. a popular company here uses x% to actually mean x% upto 80).

If we want to optimise for “semantic disconnect” a better way is to rename the feature and remove the word maximum just as I’ve done in this description. This is also important because I think most people who don’t understand Anki don’t properly read things anyway.

But as for my description, it doesn’t affect how people who don’t read manual/tooltips interpret this. For those who do read, I don’t think exceptions are an idea that will trip them up. But the feature name certainly can, and my goal isn’t to optimise for it.

58

No, it isn’t the stance.
I guess that the point here is “the” in the quote. I was talking about an already mentioned specified thing in the context, not about unspecified things.

The already mentioned thing is the meaning of “reviews” in the suggested change:

I meant that the arbitrary meaning of “review/reviews” would make Anki more confusing. (I didn’t mean something like “Generally speaking, exclusions make things confusing”.)

I guess that the point here is also “the”. It is in front of the “arbitrary” in the original text though it is not in the quote above. Due to the difference, the quote’s meaning seems to be different from the original text.

I was talking about an already mentioned specified thing in the context, not about unspecified things.

The original text (and its context before and after) is as follows:

I meant that usage of the arbitrary new “review/reviews” would introduce more discrepancy about “review/reviews” in Anki. (If "Whether I can call the usage ‘definition’ or ‘addition to the terminology’ " becomes a matter, I’m ok with not calling so, at least for the moment.)

When focusing on the situation with the suggested change, what the “reviews” of that label refers to would be changed by the “optimizing for comprehensibility”. I’m concerned that two kind of different meanings of “review/reviews” would exist in the deck options page:

image
image372×521 50.4 KB

So, for now, I doubt that the change would be “optimizing for comprehensibility” for the options page as a whole.

Also, I suppose such collisions of meaning would occur in Statistics screen, too. So, I doubt that the change would be “optimizing for comprehensibility” for the system as a whole, too.

59

I’ve come to the same conclusion but to be honest, I don’t think your arguments made sense. I don’t think I was adding a third “arbitrary” meaning to the word reviews. That’s pure intellectual gymnastics.

But I can totally see users half understanding what the word review can mean from this, and then absurdly extrapolating it to other deck option settings. Also, please use simpler syntax.

60

If the “meaning” is a matter, “rule” may be better:

‘By the suggested change, an arbitrary rule would be added to “review/reviews”.’

I suppose what it actually refers to is more important. It is not changed: