I forgot to write about an important coming change to the GanbarOmeter gauge itself:
The weighting calculation for “new” R/K/V items will (hopefully) be much more rational and understandable/intuitive.
In the settings form you specify the following (default values shown):
Desired number of Apprentice Items: 100
Extra weighting for 'new' items (items in stages 1 and 2):
Kanji: 3.0
Radicals: 0.75
Vocabulary: 1.25
The default values mean that kanji in stages 1 and 2 are three times “heavier”/harder than normal apprentice items, radicals are slightly “lighter”/easier, and new vocabulary is only slightly harder. You could set any of the three weighting values to 1.0 if you wanted to treat those items normally.
The GanbarOmeter still displays a value between 0 and 100%. Even if you’ve got a crazy number of items in your apprentice queue, it will peg the display at 100%. The straight up (50%) value represents a “normal”/desired level of difficulty.
Say you had 125 items in your apprentice queue (stages 1-4). Without any weighting applied the GanbarOmeter would display 62.5%:
125 / (2 * desired) = 125 / 200 = 0.625
But let’s say that within the 125 apprentice items, 8 were new kanji, 4 were new radicals, and 16 were new vocabulary items (where “new” means in stages 1 or 2). The adjusted GanbarOmeter display would be 72.5% based on this calculation:
items in stages 3 & 4: 98 * 1.0 = 98
+ kanji in stages 1 & 2: 8 * 3.0 = 24
+ radicals in stages 1 & 2: 4 * 0.75 = 3
+ vocab in stages 1 & 2: 16 * 1.25 = 20
---
Apprentice items: 125 ---
Weighted items: 145
Displayed value = weighted items / (2 * desired items)
= 145 / 200
= 0.725
Eventually, I plan to (optionally) modify the displayed value even further by looking at upcoming assignments for at least the next month. Since reviews you do today can impact the workload up to 4 months in the future, it makes sense to look for days in the future with a large number of reviews scheduled. The point of the GanbarOmeter is to tell you when to slow down or speed up doing lessons: looking at the apprentice queue is just a leading indicator, the best way to do it would be to peer into the future.
To keep myself sane, however, and to have some hope of releasing the new version within my lifetime, I’m going to push that feature to a subsequent release. [Note to self: I can use @rfindley 's AWESOME Ultimate Timeline script to figure out a reasonable weighting algorithm for this. Just set it to look forward by SRS level for 120 days, then grab regions at 2 weeks, 1 month, and 4 months.]
(Cheers to @daikirai for pushing me to consider new radicals as lighter-weight than kanji or vocab.)