Some simple ideas about how to improve the knowledge management

[dsuarez]

I left a rate in the Anki Adds-on page. Your add on is wonderful. It was something I was looking for (I reached your project from 2anki). I am into your approach, as it considers Notion the "source of truth" and the questions in Anki are a result of a process that can be improved or customized.

I have some simple ideas about how to increase the knowledge management and awareance in Anki. I would like to share them with you, as you are in a privileged situation to put them into practice, so I hope you take them into consideration. Please, do not hesitate to contact me if I you think I can help further. Moreover, if you have new ideas or a better approach, please let me know, even if you do not wish to work further in the plugin, maybe I could have time myself to work on it.

1. Although tags are wonderful, the way to tag questions requires a lot of effort. What do you think about having a property "Tags" in the page and assign all the Tags in there to all the questions that will be sent to Anki? In addition, specific tags could be added to specific questions as it is done now, in addition to "page tags".
2. Toggles are ok, but sometimes I want to use a toggle to hide parts of text I do not want to see when I review it. What do you think about using an icon to indicate the import process on to ignore that toggle?

Moreover I would like to raise an issue I think nobody has addressed succesfully yet. I think that tackle it from Notion would be great. I am talking about knowledge context and structure.

When I create the questions for a specific topic, I usually create additional fields to my notes in Anki (Source, Context, Section title, Topic, Knowledge area, and some more). I show some of them in the card template, and so, I can get a context about the question.

3. This extra fields could be added during the import process to anki, in the same way I proposed for Tags in point 1. Source could be the Anki page and the rest of the fields could be a mimic of the page properties. That properties will apply to all the questions.
4. In addition to 3, the property "Section Title" can be taken from the previous Headers in Notion.

I thinks these features would be very helpful to add context to the Anki notes with very little effort in the Notion side of the learning process.

Example:

Notion page title: Administrative Law > History
Properties
Knowledge area: Law
Source: notion.so/john/xxxxxx
Context: History of administrative law
Topic: Administrative Law > History
Tags: history law

HEADER 1

Header 2

header 3

My question...

--- Card ---
Knowledge area: Law
Source: notion.so/john/xxxxxx
Context: History of administrative law
Topic: Administrative Law > History
Tags: history law
Section Title: 1. History of Administrative Law > 1.1. XX Century > 1.1.3. 1980-2000

Question about adminsitrative law [...] blah blah blah.

---

Sorry for the long post, Thanks for the plugin!

[dsuarez]

Hello. Please, check my fork in https://github.com/dsuarez/notion-anki-sync.

I did the points 1 and 3 from my previous message. I also changed a little the stylesheet and the questions templates to show the information. Not all page properties from Notion are imported, just Area, Context, Topic and Tags. Point 4 is not as I described it, but was easy to do: Title is the Notion page title.

Maybe the properties to import can be parametrized in the config; and the the addon can build automatically the question template according to them.

[9dogs]

Hi! Thanks for the valuable feedback!

When talking about tags and additional fields/properties you mean Notion database entries, do you? I don't think plain Notion pages have such customizations.

If that's the case, it totally makes sense to build an Anki card model based on a database entry model. And points 1, 3, and 4 seem quite easy to implement. Thus, I see 2 modes of operation here:

1. For simple pages we leave it as it is (with the addition of p. 2);
2. For database entries pages we create a new model per-database and fill all the fields from DB to Anki. Then the user can edit the card template as necessary.

I don't want to abandon "the simple way" since I use it😄.

As for your fork, could you please put the changed files inside notion_sync_addon subfolder (so the full path will be like notion-anki-sync/notion_sync_addon/model.css.

[dsuarez]

Hello, I made a mistake saving the files in the right location. I will fix it.

I totally agree with the possibility of keeping current operation mode.

Just from the start, I created a notion table with my readings and I added it to the addon config with the "recursive" feature set to true; it worked seamlessly, importing all the questions in all the database pages.

Your proposal of new models (QA and cloze) per DB sounds good. Maybe even with the option to assign to a given Deck.

It is working great for my requirements currently: only a DB with the fields I described. Point 4 would be great, but I havent started to work on it.

[9dogs]

@dsuarez, you can ignore toggles by putting "❕" in front of the toggle title (type :! in Notion and select the white exclamation mark)