Hey everyone! As the end of the year approaches (and as we soar past 600 subs and 3300 cards!), we (the Malleus maintainer team) would like to update you all on some of the progress we’ve made over the past few weeks.
Our main priority has been to continue to try and make contributing to the deck easier to rapidly accelerate card creation. Perhaps the most exciting news we have is one of our lead maintainer’s and incoming 2025 intern @sabicool has developed an incredible new open-source Anki Add-On available to download for free here, which syncronises with our Notion site, allowing you to simply search for diseases or topics you’re creating cards on and automatically grab the appropriate tags to your cards from both the ‘Subject’ and ‘Pharmacology’ databases. It saves you the hassle of copying and pasting from the web browser! At this stage, only the subject and pharmacology databases are supported, but we are working to expand it to all of the core Malleus databases, all preceded by # in the Anki browser within the Malleus deck. This expands upon the pre-existing functionality of the separate Malleus Anki chrome web-app available to download here, which has also been expanded to work on most websites to search and reveal relevant cards in the Malleus deck within Anki, and especially works well with RCH and Therapeutic Guidelines. Please keep an eye out on our YouTube channel linked here for some videos which are being edited at the moment to help explain how to use these plugins.
Other key developments include splitting ‘Surgery’ and ‘Emergency Medicine’ into separate Subjects within the subject database. We are still looking to improve these databases, so please send us any feedback on how we should best improve it to efficiently map topics in these areas. We have also begun systematically applying “High Yield” attributes to diseases and topics we feel should be prioritised for card creation (ie. Diabetes, Myocardia Infarction, Stroke) alongside progress indicators (can be viewed on all disease pages), so we can now track our progress towards our ultimate goal of content coverage and deck completion much more effectively. This visual “map” will also be made public as well so you can always be up to date on where we’re at and where you might like to help contribute cards to an area of need! Our note-types are also being experimented with at the moment, particularly for pharmacology cards (allowing for centralisation of information onto one note) and using randomisation as a technique for optimising learning of content like calculating GCS (thanks to fantastic work by one of our other lead maintainer’s @alexlewis).
We would like to reiterate that all of our fortnightly Malleus Clinical Medicine Committee meetings are public and anyone is welcome to attend. It’s very informal and we just talk through how to improve the deck, and resolve issues identified by users. All current deck maintainers attend, and we encourage you to join if you have the time and are interested in helping out with any aspect of the project, from the technical side of maintaining the deck to assisting with approving/rejecting cards to informing our vision for the project. All of our upcoming meetings and related Zoom links are available on the homepage of our Notion site. Our next meeting is tomorrow at 3:30pm Brisbane time.
To ensure our ongoing viability as a project for furthering the education of medical students and JMOs, we now have an Australian Business Number (ABN): 54 450 262 004 and are also in the process of registering as a nonprofit organisation with the Australian Charities and Nonprofits Commission (ACNC). We will update you all again once we have more details on the outcome of this process.
As is becoming tradition, we would also like to give a shoutout to our most active users over the past week (who are absolutely smashing the spacebar):
- 1928 reviews: @nikdrobetz
- 1505 reviews: @zohal1999
- 1385 reviews: @tchtrish
- 581 reviews: @coffeecupme
- 577 reviews: @cthulhudagod
Best of luck to those of you sitting exams at the moment, and we look forward to seeing where this project goes over the coming months. Thanks again to those of you who have submitted cards over the past few weeks (especially @mrvhyte and @cthulhudagod) and who have worked with us collaboratively to get them into the deck as part of our peer review process! As always, feel free to jump on our Discord or check out our FaceBook page.