Ideas worth to work on : an Anki Hub (🇬🇧 only)

Anki is a well-known software in the learning world.

It is based on the principle of space-repetition-system. Let’s say you want to learn a specific language (like french). One of the main challenge is to remember quite a bunch of new words, but learning vocabulary is not what is the most fun.

What you do with Anki is that you create a flashcard, with is a card with two faces (like an IRL card) with the french word you want to learn on one face, and the translation on the other.

When launching the software, it’ll display the english word. You’ll have to guess the french one, and after a while, you just press Enter and it displays. Here lies your honesty: depending on your answer, you’ll check the corresponding choice between “Fail” - “Hard” - “Easy”. By doing so, Anki will send you the card again in a day, a week or a month.

This system is quite effective if you’re taking the habit to spend a few minutes a day on it. Possibilities are endless, and since Anki is open-source, the software is greatly maintained on quite every possible platform : both desktops (Windows/Linux/Mac) and mobile (iOS/Android).

What makes the software great in my opinion is what makes a software great today : it’s community. Anki has gathered quite a crowd of people wanting to learn anything, and by anything I mean really anything : while languages are the main part of community decks (deck = set of flashcard about a specific topic), you can learn history, math, programming, etc. I remember I found a french student that made a 1500-cards decks about math formula in LaTeX I used during my studies !

Even though the software is well in place, what keeps me wondering is the absence of an AnkiHub : similarly to GitHub, decks can evolve, and currently people that share them aren’t maintaining them forever. That’s normal, that’s how it works in life : you spend time on things, then they may not interest you anymore. However, for folks that did used the deck, it is quite sad, since the cards do not evolve anymore.

What would be awesome is the existence of an AnkiHub instance, maybe decentralized, in order to keep decks improving throughout time.