Would it be possible to have some function to bring forward reviews that are scheduled to happen within the next hour to now?
I understand the gapping of the reviews are there for a reason, and I’m not arguing with that. But sometimes when you have ten minutes to kill – you know, when you’ve enough time for a few reviews not enough time to get in to stuff – and you check and it’s like 15 minutes until the next ten are released and the lessons are all done (and then the short gap you had would be over). It would be useful to be able to just bring them forward for within the hour they might have appeared. And if it’s just within the hour, it shouldn’t screw up the pacing set up you have.
Yes, the SRS-intervals may have some data and statistics to them, but they are not individually created for your learning needs nor is there any support for the effect of 15 minutes here or there (my guess, but it seems very unlikely).
How to implement this across a platform like this is another question where I’m guessing as the current system assigns a SRS tag to all items individually. But if you can demote/promote items at any time = changing their SRS, then surely this is something that can be done?
I do think my own reviewing behavior was gradually changed due to how WK works and I found my footing doing so. I don’t feel I had any issue really under this system, but as the OP is suggesting, just having minor flexibility build into the system would probably mean a lot to everyone of us doing WK while working, studying etc and because it makes it even more likely that we do our SRS intervals close in time to when the items are up and we can spread items out across the day.
The last is something I did, and felt was very positive.
Wouldn’t the srs tag be assigned after the results of a review are sent to the server? And the time would just be a barrier before trying it again, so one could flag an item that’s 15 minutes or less to being unlocked and offer the option to do them right now.
You could even keep them in the original timeslot. If an item was up for review at 7 pm and you did it at 6:45 pm, you could still keep the next cycle as if it was done 7 pm, to make it even simpler
Just playing devil’s advocate, but if you could start review sessions 15min early, would the argument then shift to, “Crud, I have to wait 15min for the 15-min-early window to start”.
I’m not dismissing the idea… I’m just offering a perspective. There have been times when I’m at the grocery store, and it’s 15min until the rotisserie chickens will be done cooking. They could start cooking the chickens earlier, but then someone arriving at the grocery store earlier than me would be in the same situation, so there’s a certain arbitrariness to it, even if it doesn’t seem like it to the person who has to wait.
It feels similar when you get 89% of your kanji to Guru, but you have to wait for that last 1% before you can level up.
Just a little reminder on how our SRS works. When your next review datetime is calculated, we floor the result to the beginning of the hour. So, for example, if the review completion was registered at 12:59 and the next review time was calculated to be 3:59, then we floor the time to 3:00. So in essence you are already getting these reviews earlier than you are “suppose to”.
but from what i’ve read, the API doesn’t offer any way to change when a review is going to be available. so there’s no “easy” way to do that. someone (was that you, @ctmf ?) suggested that a script could check what reviews you’ve got upcoming, present them to you early, store your results, and then send them to the server when the review is actually available. that does create some complications though, but i’ve got no idea how complicated it’d be.
so, it’s probably possible. but whether it’s sensible, i dunno
I didn’t say 15 minutes early. I said click a button to within an hour – or half an hour - to have any appropriate reviews available to do there and then, any that don’t get done stay in the pile to be done and released when they would otherwise. If only over guru things apply, that’s fine. I don’t see how the extra half an hour would make any difference. It’s just a bit tantalising if you have a short gap, as said, that it would be nice to do something useful in rather than staring blankly at an email or whatever for ten minutes. It doesn’t have to alter the future timing of the reviews of that lot (it could still be tagged as having been completed at the time it would have been completed anyway – although I’m sure programming wise that might be more annoying, because programming wise everything is more annoying in my non-web-programming experience). If you see it’s an hour ahead, it’s a bit different – for me anyway.
It was just a suggestion of something that would be an improvement to me personally, and might be something others liked as well. It’s not exactly pivotal on my keeping using it.
If we’re talking strictly “possible”, I think yes. My reasoning there starts from the assumption that if you can do it by hand, then it can be automated.
You could, with a pencil and paper:
Go to wkstats.com, list every item you have waiting, hover the mouse over it, and see when that item’s next review is.
order all the items by next review time
take the ones that are coming up pretty soon, and quiz yourself on them, writing down your answers
go to bed
the next time you do reviews, after the items are really due, get out your list of answers, and do the reviews. New reviews you do normally, but if you already have an answer on your list from your ‘early’ review, type in that answer without thinking. (for the automated version, without even asking ‘yourself’ the question)
So if you can do that manually, it should be possible to write a script that automates it.
Whether that’s a good idea or not, or whether someone who knows how is willing to spend time on it, are complete other questions. I’m pretty sure such a thing does not already exist.
Note that this idea would not back-date the review to when it was originally due. For that the script would have to keep track of time and do the already-answered items without you at the right time, which seems harder. But again, if you could do it manually, it should be theoretically possible for a script.
The main issue is that a normal userscript requires you to be on the page in order to run, but given that such a script’s main purpose would be to make sure a review is submitted when you’re away, it probably won’t be as effective. The best it could do is submit the review the next time you visit the page, keeping it in local storage until then, which would cause the next SRS stage to appear “delayed”. Whether this is a problem will depend on the individual user, but it might not match with how people would expect this to work.
If you don’t care too much about when exactly the review is submitted, writing such a script is possible. You could fetch all upcoming items, let them be reviewed by inserting them into the review page (although you might need to activate it on your own if no other reviews are available), then storing the results somewhere and when the script loads again submit all reviews that are now actually due. It’s theoretically possible to implement it that way.
If you do really want to submit the reviews the moment they’re due, you’d need to have some device that’s permanently on (e.g. a separate server) keep track of the reviews and submit them for you when they’re due. That’s also possible theoretically, but I doubt anyone would realistically implement something like that.
I think the problem a challenge with doing it unattended is, what happens if you fail. Normally it makes you answer until you get it right, but if it’s unattended…
Since verifying the correct answer is done client-side anyways, I don’t think this is too much of a problem. You can just implement it the same way normal reviews work, by keeping track of the number of times you reviewed an item incorrectly, then sending that information along with the review when submitting it.
The main problem is that actually implementing reviewing items would probably be a pain. You can’t rely on WK to submit item data for you (you actually need to prevent it), and you need to make sure the review page is enabled even if there are no current reviews in order to be able to do future reviews early. I know it’s possible since a number of scripts that insert reviews can do this, but it’s still a lot of work to implement and maintain. The main reason I think a script like this doesn’t exist yet is because it’s a lot of work to write and there’s not a high enough demand to warrant it.
I guess we’ll have to see if someone feels up to implementing something like this. It’s theoretically possible, but it would still be quite a major script to address a very small issue. The pen-and-paper approach of just writing your reviews down and entering them later seems a lot easier by comparison
Personally, I am in favor of being able to study any time you have time available, though that is slightly at odds with an SRS system, which is really just a time-management system designed to minimize the amount of time you have to study in order to remember things. And it’s a good system for most people for a number of reasons, but people who are good at keeping a regular study schedule and pacing their learning may be better off operating outside of the SRS. (…which is what I wrote Self-Study Quiz for)
