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Comment by emilga | Hacker News Reader

How are you able to keep 10000 notes in Anki organized? With that many notes, how can you tell whether something you want to remember is already in your notes or not?

It seems to me that the Anki card browser is quite bad at this, but maybe I'm just bad at using it!

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I mostly put everything in the same deck. There are a handful of notes that are similar or contain the same information, it's not really a big deal. If it really bothers me, I just suspend the duplicate while studying and I never see it again (this is trivial to do in the mobile app).

I have a custom note format that I use, with custom fields and custom formatting. It looks something like this:

  Front
  Back
  Context
  Source
  Date
  Author
  Hint
  Extra
  Reverse

"Front" and "Back" are self-explanatory. "Context" is shown on the front of the card, if specified, and is a reminder of the broad context of the note (if it's a note about Python, for example, then I'd put "Python" in the Context). If "Reverse" contains any text, then Anki will generate two cards: front->back and a back->front, which lets me test both directions of the knowledge (it's really helpful to be able to recall information in either direction).

Here's the note template I use (sans formatting, which is standard CSS):

Front:

  <header>
    Deck: {{Deck}} {{#Tags}}&diams; Tags: {{Tags}}{{/Tags}}
  </header>

  {{#Context}}
  <div id="context">{{Context}}</div>
  {{/Context}}

  <div class="front">{{Front}}</div>

  {{#Hint}}<div class="hint">{{hint:Hint}}</div>{{/Hint}}

Back:

  {{FrontSide}}
  <div class="back">
    <hr>
    {{Back}}
  </div>
  <br>
  <div class="extra">{{#Extra}}{{Extra}}{{/Extra}}</div>

  <br><br>
  <div class="metadata">
    {{#Source}}Source: {{Source}} <br>{{/Source}}
    {{#Author}}Author: {{Author}} <br>{{/Author}}
    {{#Date}}Date: {{Date}}{{/Date}}
  </div>

Thank you! :)

1. Anki has search, tags and hierarchical organization.

2. If you don't remember that you already have something, it means Anki is failing you, because the whole point of it is to help you remember.

3. BUT! it doesn't really matter if you add the same note several times, it will just make it appear for review more often.

It seems like the value of the platform is in the well-classified data made by the community in the same way that emacs "killer feature" is the bazillions of community .el extensions. Is there a Github or some defacto standardized way people publish their Anki notes?

Yes, check out: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/

Do you mind elaborating a bit on how to do this well?

For example, I know it's possible to create a filtered deck which collects notes from several different decks. I can therefore use each deck to organize the different subjects and practice all of them by reviewing the filtered deck. Or do you mean the hierarchical-tag add-on? Or something else?

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