Yes, they are finally here! You can now create your own lists with whatever word or sections or traditional variants you want. I’ve built a few of the custom lists that were being put together in a google doc, and we’ll put the rest of them up shortly (unless of course you want to beat us to the punch!). Go check out the new tools.
There are a few key things that have been put into the first version of this system.
First: the lists can be published and shared with others. You don’t have to publish them, you can just keep your private collection of lists for your own usage, but we hope you’ll share the ones you like with other users!
Second: you can ‘remix’ any list. Simply go to that list’s page and click ‘Remix’ and a new draft will be made pre-populated with that list’s words. You can take another person’s custom list and make a new version of it with more words or a different organization or whatever you’d like.
Note that you can make remixes of textbooks (say for teachers who want to make tailored lists for their classes) but the system is a bit slow with such large lists. I’ll be trying to figure out ways to improve its efficiency, but for now if you choose to remix a large list, I recommend a browser with speedy Javascript!
Third: remixed lists that are published are associated with one another so that people can easily see new or competing versions of a list. We hope that this will encourage people to collaborate with one another, building off each other’s improvements, and generally making better and better lists. It will also help keep lists organized by building them as version trees.
Fourth: For the sake of stability, published lists are immutable. We don’t want lists used by many people to change. You can edit lists that you made that are unpublished (and that you may be studying), but once they’re published you’ll just have to remix a new version.
There are of course more ways we can organize these lists. I’ll be putting in a search engine soon so that you can search the custom lists just like you can search forum topics. And perhaps later we’ll add tagging and rating systems as needed to further organize things. But I wanted to make sure the remixing system was in place first to see if it will be effective.
Also, besides the new custom list system, the vocabulary lists page has been upgraded to help give users an overview of the vocabulary sources available to them. Many people didn’t know we had a queue and what it was for, so this should help.
All right, make some lists!