A quick look at Anki's shared decks feature
2024-07-06
I have mentioned Anki quite a few times on this blog already and truly believe that it's an awesome piece of software for anyone that studies a topic and needs to memorize aspects of it - may that be a vocabs for a language, circuit diagram symbols for the engineering class you're taking or something else. But so far, I have only superficially talked about the community features of Anki (and need a topic for this week as I'm quite busy with a new project and personally), so let's talk about them now...
Even though AnkiWeb isn't open source from what I can gather, it is the official community service of the Anki project and follows the same open knowledge spirit. It is free to use, respects the user's privacy and has a simple as well as straightforward user interface. It primarily offers two key features, both of which we'll look at. First and foremost, it offers the back-end for online sync with the official desktop and mobile apps. Simply create an account on the AnkiWeb , which only requires sharing minimal information about you (mail address and a password), sign into this account from all your devices and choose to force-push the local database of your primary device on first sync. The clients should then automatically sync on launch and quit, which makes it a breeze to keep everything in sync. This feature is especially useful when you like to create your flashcards on a computer, but primarily review them on a mobile device like I do for example.
But the really integral part of the Anki experience is the shared decks feature AnkiWeb provides.
Everyone with an AnkiWeb account can easily share their decks with the community only having to provide
a title as well as short description of the deck and literally anyone with the Anki app installed can
download these shared decks - even without having an AnkiWeb account themselves, which is a great
approach in my mind. Sure, rating decks and writing review requires an account, which is reasonable to
avoid spam, but this zero-requirements or no-account-required attitude is very rare these days. To get a
shared deck simply choose the
Get shared
option in the client you're using, search for a fitting deck using the category or language filters and
download the corresponding
.apkg
file(s) for the deck(s) you chose. Then import them into your Anki client like any other deck, sync them
and start studying right away. As this community feature is really open, the decks can be of varying
quality, but in general there are always multiple great decks available and if they aren't, feel free to
create one yourself and publish it.
This is exactly what I have done in preparation for my Abitur, so feel free to download one of my decks in case you've also chosen math, computer science, physics and/or English as one of your Abitur exam subjects in Lower Saxony. All of them are written in German as that's my primary language for studying, but especially the math cards might also offer some value to you regardless of language. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this quick look and have a lovely day...