I made a poll regarding a built-in deck, but the results were mixed.
I agree with you here. As I said before, it will almost certainly be useful for some users.
At the moment, I think it would be a good idea to incorporate these into my sidebar add-ons (just an idea).
[ Sidebar Add-on ]
[ tab 1 ] AnkiManual
[ tab 2 ] Reddit r/Anki
[ tab 3 ] Reddit r/medicalschoolanki
[ tab 4 ] AnkiForums
[ tab 5 ] Discord / Anki
In short, users can use AnkiManual to do their own research, and if they don’t understand something, they can ask questions to the community. I will not incorporate Youtube as I think it is distracting, but for medical students it might be a good idea to incorporate Anking’s Youtube.
However, I think these store cookies for login, so security would be vulnerable. I am not familiar with it, so I am not sure how risky it is (Though I use them because they are convenient). And I sometimes get feedback from users that Discord is distracting and they would like to use something else.
Do you think the wording could be improved? More personal is better because it reduces bias IMHO. “Should X happen” would make the vote something like you see in a government body where the focus is less personal. “How will/would’ve X impacted you” gets responses closer to what it actually should be. I say this because I’m thinking what if some people are trying to second-guess the responses of others while making their vote.
When the advanced deck is released I want one too. Search commands and shortcut keys would be interesting.
The simplest solution to the manual alternative is guides on YouTube. There are a lot of them there, from simple program reviews to detailed ones for several videos. All that remains is to find these videos and leave links (or, if possible, embed them) in the manual in a separate section.
An additional advantage of this approach will be the subsequent YouTube 
recommendations of other ANKI videos.
Actually think about it again. 53.9 percent r/Anki members have read the Manual. It would be even lower among the general users who are not in r/Anki
I think it is fair to assume redditors are a bit more nerdy. But even if you don’t buy into that, the target here is new users mainly. I think we get a selection bias in r/Anki because they’re people who probabaly have been Anki-ing for a long time.
Have you seen Information cards that some deck authors use? It’s basically a card that has some relevant information regarding the deck and then you read it and suspend it.
About the point you raised regarding “abuse”, I like to think of Anki cards as small websites so Front can have the topic name and Back can have the information. The users need not try to do an “active recall” at this point.
How do you view Github for that purpose? That website needs a subscription if I’m not wrong.
r/Anki subredit is proof that many people ask without reading and will continue to do so. Most questions are already answered multiple times in the very same community. So just a quick search there would answer most of their questions. They want a spoonfed answer and don’t invest time as they are not interested in the tool per se but in getting good grades. I am generalizing for the average Joe.
I think a fine-tuned LLM with data from the manual, forums and subredits could be a good add-on, so AI could answer high-yield questions people ask in the community and prevent human volunteers from wasting time repeating the same information and spend time on non-trivial questions and discussions.
Here’s an updated draft of an intro deck I’m working on if anyone is interested: Google Drive link. I decided against embedding tutorials on the cards for the time being since they look horrible on mobile. I’d love to hear some feedback. I’m thinking of keeping the first deck as short as possible and then creating a few subdecks to cover additional topics.
Making this accessible from Anki would be great. Or even an autoresponder or bot for Reddit and Discord. Unfortunately, such a feature would cost money to run so it might to be available for free, or at least not without requiring some sort of authentication to prevent abuse. Also, Discourse has AI capabilities built-in now: https://meta.discourse.org/t/official-discourse-ai-plugin/259214
We should not forget that we have a good indicator that a lot of users use the existing answers: the number of times a link has been clicked.
In my opinion, when users ask questions in the community, it has the effect of improving their motivation to learning, not just to find out how to use Anki.
It’s just like when people work or study in a library or coffee shop they are more easily able to concentrate, so I think even pointless questions are beneficial.
Isn’t “Let’s get begin” grammatically incorrect? Check the first card.
Normally I would say users have can have varying levels of understanding on how to use things, but considering I’ve had people from the sub tell me that information on the documentation is “Curse of Knowledge” I highly agree with you.
This is what we ended up publishing as a first version (work in progress):
We are also thinking about how we can integrate tutorials like these into Anki to make getting started as easy as possible.:
@dae I’m not sure if I mentioned this free library of tutorials we are working on 
The idea is to have a tutorial to accompany everything in the manual.
Someone recently bought up the idea of a beginner-friendly fork of Anki with pre-installed tutorials in the form of add-ons.
I don’t see why this would require a separate fork of Anki. I also think it would be confusing to require new users to understand there are multiple versions of Anki, and they shouldn’t install the official version. Why not just make official Anki more beginner-friendly? What are the biggest barriers to this, aside from Damien having limited bandwidth (which is a solvable problem, btw)?
One potential issue I see is the difficulty of reaching a consensus regarding what changes should be made to optimize the UX of new users since these would potentially affect all users. Hopefully that could be done in a way that improves the QoL of new users and Anki experts. I imagine there could be some resistance to change from Anki power users when it comes to considering aesthetic improvements as well. For better or worse, aesthetics has a big impact on whether the UI feels beginner-friendly.
I agree. Official Anki becoming more beginner friendly is certainly more desirable. But in the meantime, how do you all plan to use a onboarding deck? The best way to distribute is linking people to a Anki version that comes with the deck pre-installed. That is assuming most people who’ll use it are new users without much knowledge of how Anki works.
As you’ve mentioned, consensus is an issue. And it seems to me that power users’ opinions are much more visible here so it of course has a sway over things. Take the conversation we had on learn ahead limit for example.
Anyone who creates an AnkiHub account (free) gets subscribed to this deck automatically. Once they log into AnkiHub from Anki Desktop, the deck will be installed.
I think it would make sense to present users with the option to install this deck the first time they install Anki. Alternatively, you could just install the deck automatically or include the latest version of it in each new release. Of course, Ankihub would be required to push out the latest version to users as we update it.
We’ve also discussed the idea of triggering the tutorials I shared based on user actions. E.g.,
The tutorials I shared are embeddable, so they can be embedded on cards or any Anki review. This would, I think, get us pretty close to the look/feel of a native product tour in Anki.
I think one potential solution would be to explicitly define the process or governance model by which new features are proposed, discussed, and prioritized. For example, Python has PEPs and Django has DEPs. This could include etiquette, “rules,” etc, to help avoid pitfalls like bikeshedding.
I’m not sure if there has been any effort to formalize Anki’s governance model.
I think the biggest issue is that this deck would have to be translated into every language that Anki supports. Though I still think it would be worth it long-term.
