WK should work with script devs and officially implement some of them

I’ve been using WK for a year and it is baffling how it lacks so many good tools that users have already implmented or that we can find on other platforms.

Things like:

  • Adding a delay when you make a mistake so you don’t accidentally move on without realizing your mistake;
  • A correction option. This is especially needed on mobile since it is a lot easier to mistype words there;
  • Other ways to review what we have already learned. I’d love to review a couple of burned items, work more on recently learned words, and be able to customize the levels I want to get them from, if I want only radicals/kanji/vocab;
  • PWA. I’m pretty sure that there won’t be an official app, but there doesn’t need to be one since this website is already so good! Turning it into a PWA will take a lot of work, but having the static part of the site cached would save a lot of mobile data for users and make it load faster (besides being able to install it on your phone and have it run like an app).
28 Likes

I’m Pretty Sure I’m Happy With The Current Wanikani.
We Are Already Able To Customize WaniKani Whatever Way We Want With The Script.
And If There Is A bug Or Error In The Script Wanikani Will be blamed.
It’s Not Like Everyone Wants The Scripts You Mentioned Above.
The Ability To add scripts Your Way Is Also what Makes Wanikani WANIKANI.

12 Likes

I agree.
It’s good that WK has an open API, but some common scripts really could be integrated into the main site.

WK is really benefiting a lot from community goodwill, especially when we consider that there aren’t even first party apps (in 2022). It would be nice if they recognised that and picked up some of the effort here and there. Maintainers, after all, can also burn out at any time (this is happening more and more in recent times in the open source community, for example).

6 Likes

Absolutely no to the idea of a delay after a mistake. That sounds annoying.

6 Likes

Just FYI, it’s kind of hard to read when you type like that

17 Likes

I will try changing it

1 Like

yep if we make a mistake we can check it after the reviews right

1 Like

How about typing like this?

18 Likes

Divine

7 Likes

I think the current approach is actually quite smart. Instead of integrating a lot of features a significant portion of users wouldn’t use and bloating the program, they instead maintain an API and allow users to add anything they want to the site themselves. It allows users to customize the site to their liking, while making sure you can keep the site stable without having to hire a large team.

The API itself is also quite well designed. It’s very rare to see any site expose a public API that allows you to recreate all of a site’s functionality like this. It’s even rarer to actually see it documented.

There are a few things I would change though, which are mostly additions to the API itself. Currently it focuses mostly on the site’s data (e.g. access to site content, reviews), but lacks any features to modify the site’s UI itself, which ends up being done manually by the scripts. I would add a few functions or callbacks in the main site’s code that are documented and callable by userscripts. Personally I’d love to see some functions for adding sections to the main dashboard (something currently done manually by scripts by searching for specific tags and appending themselves into the document), or functions to modify the review/lesson queue (which would allow scripts operating during reviews like reordering scripts or scripts that add correction options to more easily do their job without having to mess with undocumented datastructures, meaning they’d probably break less often).

But in short, I think the current approach works well, and should probably be expanded upon instead of integrating scripts into the main site. Not everyone likes every feature, and the current approach makes the site highly customizable.

22 Likes

I don’t need any scripts but one and one only: be able to click a button to retype a word when you misspell for typing too fast.

I mainly use mobile and so I can’t use it. Wk could very well implement this but they probably don’t want to to prevent abuse.

2 Likes

You can do that with one of the mobile apps for Wanikani

3 Likes

That’s true, but also, a lot of users don’t know the scripts that are available because they’re not on the forums, or don’t know what they want and would find certain functionality useful that they’d never think to try a script for. WK already has settings to turn certain functionality on and off, a lot of it being off by default (e.g. I only recently discovered and turned on vocab audio when doing reviews), so I see no reason not to use popular scripts as inspiration for future optional functionality.

5 Likes

Actually, I think it would be cool if WK officially supported some of the especially good scripts. Like, to recognize (and hopefully also compensate?) the people who’ve put a lot of work into making something that improves WK for so many.

8 Likes

I don’t like this at all

Don’t know how to feel about an official way to “cheat”, I guess. The double check script is known for being a trap that makes people erase mistakes because they believe they clearly knew the answer, so I think needing to install it first is a pretty good thing.

Yeah, the self study script should be an official tool IMO

Imo, rather than deal with the mess of officializing scrips, WK should make finding scripts easier to access and to install. Kinda like a steam mod page lol.

7 Likes

In general, this is a topic that I also recently started to think about and it’s possible that I would’ve posted something similar in the near future. I really completely support the idea of making certain scripts official, since their functionality seems like outsourcing/delegating work onto users that should actually be in place out of the box imho.

As for specifics:
Ad1, Ad4) Not on my radar, but if optional I have no objection.
Ad2) Oh the kana typos! I currently don’t have double check on, and I can imagine this being controversial. This particular feature can be a double-edged sword as others have mentioned, but can provide a lot of value, given you’re not abusing it.
Ad3) Yes. Item inspector, self-study quiz. Studying burned items and endless practice. Y E S.

4 Likes

Thinking about it, I actually think if the WK team compensates the users to get their scripts, we could have an “official add ons” systems, instead of just making all scripts part of the baseline WK experience.

Have a widget windows, where you can implement new stuff that you’d add by installing scripts. This would keep the customization and pick and choose nature of scripts while being easier to acess to non forum users/maintained by the wk staff

Don’t make double check official tho

This is a nice idea, but I can assure you that from a development point-of-view, making and maintaining an add-on system is a lot more work and mess than integrating some existing scripts, so a lot less likely to happen.

6 Likes

wouldn’t wk still have to maintain the scripts if they’re integrated? To make them always up to date anyways

It would be nice to have some of the mentioned features, especially the “double-check” feature, because it’s very easy to mistype on mobile and lose weeks or even months of progress on some item. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a little aggravating at times.

In general less typing would help, but then we would end up with a better Web Anki client :sweat_smile: