anki-geo/ultimate-geography v4.0

on GitHub

It's time for a new MAJOR version! 🎉

Why all the fuss? In short, we've removed some of the most obscure content from the deck by defining precise inclusion rules for political entities. We hope you'll find those rules to be sensible and the deck to be more enjoyable to learn as a result. Read on to learn more and to find out how to upgrade the deck (don't worry, we have a solution for everyone 😉).

New inclusion rules for political entities 🚦

Why was the British Indian Ocean Territory included but not Akrotiri and Dhekelia (cf. #221)? Why was Bali included with a capital and flag, while other provinces of Indonesia weren't included at all? What was Mount Athos doing in there!? These were all fair questions...

Until now, there were no rules guiding which political entities were or were not included in the deck. Content was being added from time to time without much opposition, and content was very rarely removed (because removing something without a clear reason seemed unwise). On top of that, the content of the deck had never really been audited since its first v2 release, which inherited most of its content from the original shared deck. As a result, the deck, which was already quite bloated with small territories originally, was becoming even more bloated release after release, and therefore more and more difficult to master.

Over the course of lengthy discussions, started in #137, continued in #306, and concluded in #312, we decided to do something about it by coming up with precise, documented rules and criteria for inclusion of political entities. You can now find these rules in CONTRIBUTING.md and see them in action in the spreadsheet called political-entities.xlsx, at the root of the repository.

The new rules lead to the removal of a significant number of capitals (41), flags (38) and maps (17), for a total of 137 cards in the standard deck, thus justifying a major release. 17 notes are fully removed and 28 have had their capital and/or flag removed. The new rules will also lead to the addition of 7 notes with maps only, which will happen in a future release (cf. #315).

• For more stats, see #312 (review).
• For an exhaustive list of the removed content, see this file.
• For an exhaustive list of the removed flags and maps, see this file.

How to upgrade

If you like the removals and don't mind losing your entire progress

Perhaps you've installed the deck recently, or you've been planning on learning the deck from scratch again? If so, the simplest way to upgrade to v4 is to perform a clean import, as described in the README.

If you like the removals but would prefer to keep your progress

We've made a special "legacy" deck for you that you can import in order to move the removed notes out of the main deck. Back up your deck if you want, and just follow these few steps:

1. Download the ZIP of the legacy deck attached to the release notes, Ultimate_Geography_Legacy.zip.
2. Extract the ZIP and find the folder that matches your version of the deck.
3. In Anki, check the configuration of the CrowdAnki add-on to make sure that Do Not Move Existing Cards is unchecked. We do want the cards to move out of the main deck and into the legacy deck. You may re-enable the setting for step 5.
4. Import this folder into Anki with the CrowdAnki add-on, as explained in the README (steps 4 to 7).
5. Upgrade the main deck as explained, again, in the README (all the steps this time).
6. In Anki, in the Tools menu, select Empty Cards... and then confirm the deletion of the cards.
7. Delete the Ultimate Geography Legacy deck.
8. In the Tools menu, select Check Media... and then Check Database.
9. Open the card browser and, in the Notes menu, select Clear Unused Tags.
10. Synchronise everything ... and you're good to go!

If you don't like the removals and want to keep your progress

We understand that the changes may not be to everyone's liking. If you don't want to lose any content, follow the steps in the previous section except for step 7 (don't delete the legacy deck). You'll then be able to rename the legacy deck and review it in parallel to the main deck. You progress will be kept on notes that were fully removed from the main deck, but not on those that were removed only partially -- those will appear as "new" cards in the legacy deck. We know it's not a perfect solution but we hope it's a reasonable compromise.

Note that it is safe to move the cards from the legacy deck back into the main deck -- they won't get removed or overridden on future upgrades. However, please beware that these notes will not be maintained by UG, so their content may become outdated.

Additional content changes

Maps and flags

• 🌟 Improve maps of oceans #264 #325
• 🌟 Improve maps of Java and Sumatra #269 #309
• Stop highlighting Denmark in map of Greenland #333
• Remove graticules from maps of continents #265 #331
• Update outdated flag of the Northern Mariana Islands (now in legacy deck) #317
• Fix very subtle bug in map of the Gulf of Thailand

Country names, capitals and supplementary info

• 👉 Rename Artsakh to Republic of Artsakh as per Country field guidelines #294
• 🛠️ [FR] Fix numerous misspellings and typos in country names and capitals #291 #293 #323
• 🛠️ [FR] Fix country names and capitals as per field guidelines (and update Country info field as required): #323
  • Congo → République du Congo
  • République tchèque → Tchéquie
  • Myanmar → Birmanie
  • Ngerulmud → Melekeok (capital of Palau)
  • District de Yaren → Yaren
  • Luxembourg-Ville → Luxembourg
  • Tarawa-Sud → Tarawa
  • Guatemala-Ville → just Guatemala
• Add capital info to Switzerland to specify that Bern is the de facto capital -- the country has no official capital #322
• [EN,DE,FR] Use proper typographical character for Nukuʻalofa, the capital of Tonga #328
• [NB] Add missing capital info for Nauru #335
• [ES] Fix typo in country name of the Philippines #321

Other changes

• 🏷️ Add subregion tags for Africa: UG::West_Africa and UG::East_Africa #244 #298 #304
• 🏷️ Reorganise American tags according to 7-continent model by removing UG::America and UG::North+Central_America, and adding UG::North_America #244 #295 #300
• 🏷️ Fix tag of Greenland: UG::Europe → UG::North_America #297
• 🌔 Improve dark mode glow on flags by not offsetting it like a shadow #290
• Demonstrate use of new Ug::North_America tag in Custom study section #300
• Sort every note's tags alphabetically #300
• Fix links to issues and PRs in CONTRIBUTING.md #296
• Update links to new Anki Manual #301
• Clarify which folder to import when upgrading the deck from a ZIP file #287