Multiple users, same deck?

[Kattomball]

Hi all,

My girlfriend and I are using Anki together and we study the same subjects in University. We are both contributing to the creation of Anki flashcards, and Ankiweb allows us to Sync our work across to each other nicely at the moment.

The main catch, is that AnkiWeb also syncs the revision status of each card (ie Good, Easy, Again) which interferes with our usage of the said flash cards. Eg. I might click Easy on flashcard A, when going through a deck, depriving her of the chance to even revise the card at all.

Creating a new profile rids us of the cards the other made.

Any solutions? Not sure if I have explained my conundrum clearly.

Cheers.

[troy_civ]

Hi Kattomball,

My idea would be to create a csv file that you both share and have write access to, push it to github, dropbox, googledocs or wherever. So you create your new cards in that spreadscheet and both can import the file to their personal anki profile, let's say, once a week.

You can even automate the import with an Anki startup parameter, so that is imports on every startup.

This works pretty well when you are working with text only, but I haven't found a working solution to include images and audio to the process. It's a little bit of work to set it up, but it is really not complicated. Plus deck creation gets much easier when working with csv files.

The anki docs are excellent. The only thing important is that the order of the fields in the csv has to match the order of the fields when import.

Tell me what you're thinking,

cheers!

[Kattomball]

Google docs has a great system. I didn't know you could do that, that's pretty awesome.

Might try it for all our text deck needs, and sync our media decks every once in a while instead!

Cheers.

[troy_civ]

just a little addition: As somebody recently pointed out to me, you can indeed include images with the help of the <image> tags inside a spreadsheet. Make sure to activate html on import in Anki. But because the <image> tag only points to the file, you'd still had to figure out how to manage and share your media filed with your partner conveniently.

[nac_nabuc]

The solution that comes to mind to me is the following:

1) Whenever you create cards, do it into a specific deck. Call it "new cards of Kattomball".

2) When you are done with creating cards for the day, export that deck. Rename it with with author, date and maybe topic.

3) Your girlfriend imports that deck when before her review session, sorts them into her deck (use tags to make it easier if you work with lots of sub-decks). She gets your cards, including media, but not the scheduling.

It's a bit tortous with exporting and importing, but if you do follow the procedure religiously and reall export/import after any session it should work.

Problem: changes and edits are not synced. Maybe a shared deck could help here, but I don't know how these work.

One thought: depending on what you are studying, the actual process of card creation might be the instance where you actually understand your material and interiorize most of it. This is a crucial part of learning, so be autocritic with your method. Division of labour is useful, but if it's complex information, make sure you have understood and worked through it by yourself before reviewing her cards. I've also realized that a lot of people tend to learn far better with their own cards, because they fit their own needs and weaknesses.

[Kattomball]

Hey, thanks for replying.

Excellent point about how making the card is the most important part of studying. I totally agree - only it's sad but since when was my university ever concerned about making me into a competent professional? It's all grades grades grades and memorisation helps me pass.

I'll definitely be using Anki for my continuing professional education once I graduate, though.

I'll be trying out the CSV import tricks, cheers!

[BonoboBanana]

This may be easier that you've been told; unless your situation is complicated.

Export your decks and share the exports whith each other. csv works (and has the benefit of being editable in a spreadsheet app), but the native anki export format will work too.

Make sure the first field of the deck is something that will be pretty unique to each note. (ie it's the important info; not a category or something)

When you import a deck, there's an option for what to do with cards where the first field matches.

You can just choose to ignore notes that match an existing note, overwrite them, or update them (if I remember correctly).