Remove duplicates from existing flashcard database

dylanious

秀才
Hello,

I imported flashcards from a number of sources. Each time I imported I thought I chose to add duplicate to category. But now I have some duplicate cards in my database. Is it possible to search for duplicate cards and merge their scores? I would still like the cards to be present in multiple categories.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I'm afraid we don't support automatic duplicate merging at the moment - you can manually delete duplicated cards, but the scores won't add together that way.
 

pdwalker

状元
you could do it manually by exporting the flash cards as xml, cleaning up that xml and then reimporting the flash card database fresh.

that's what i did after screwing things up on mine. i'll have to warn you, it's one heck of a lot of work (worth it in my case) and it helps if OCD sounds like fun to you.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
This should be fixed in 4.0 (or 4.1) - we're logging a lot more card data and because of that it will now be mathematically possible to merge two cards and reconstruct the score / difficulty as if they had been one card the whole time.

But that won't work with history imported from v3 - for now if you turn on the option in Settings / Flashcards to show card statistics on list views, that will at least let you easily see which of a pair of duplicates in a duplicate search was studied more + delete the one that was studied less.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No, still working on that update. (it's a biiiig update) My best suggestion at the moment would still be that you view a list of duplicate cards in Organize with statistics and manually delete the extras.
 
No, still working on that update. (it's a biiiig update) My best suggestion at the moment would still be that you view a list of duplicate cards in Organize with statistics and manually delete the extras.
Thanks for the info and congratulations on your updates
 
I had hundreds of duplicates and I took it slowly through the summer and managed to remove most of them, at least the ones that were of the most interest to me. I noticed however that sometimes, I would add a duplicate without knowing, which is not so helpful ;-)
The way I study may help understand how this happens:
I follow courses at the Confucius Institute and every week, I create a new category that corresponds to the date of the class and the chapter we are studying. Each class represents about 150 new cards. This allows me to use spaced repetition without having hundreds of cards in one single test. So, on the one hand, it is not really spaced repetition but at the same time, I can connect the cards I study to the classes I just attended, which makes it easier to memorize. And since it is my second year at the Institute, I have maybe 1500 different cards (for example, with a two characters word, I also enter each character separately).
So, of course, there are characters that I studied months ago that "fell off the truck", so I reenter them. Having the tags is a big help as it allows me to see when I entered the character before.
But sometimes, when I add an existing card to a new category (say, I add a card which I created in March to the category of the class I just followed), instead of adding the card to the category, I just get the possibility to create a new card without getting the signal that it is a duplicate card. Then, when I study that card and wish to change the dictionary that it corresponds to, I get the signal that this is a duplicate, which means that in some instances, duplicates keep being created without me knowing it.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hmm... any chance the card is a less than perfect match? E.g. it has different traditional characters?
 
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