The list system was overhauled for many reasons, and still has some tweaks and bug fixes to go through yet, but here we’ve come to pretty much the ultimate feature that really brings it all together: published list editing.
We’ve kept published lists (those that anyone can access and study) immutable up until now because the system simply wouldn’t have accommodated the changes previously. Prior to the list system upgrade, if someone edited a list that a lot of people were using, there was a good chance those changes wouldn’t have propagated much. If you added a word to a list, people who had already added from that section wouldn’t get that new word, and conversely, if a word was removed, it would still be studied by those who had already added it. It all depended on where on the list the word was added, and where on the list it was being added from by any given person. And it would have been even more disorienting if sections were removed, added, or shuffled around.
But now, with the system automatically handling changes to lists and updating your studies accordingly, you can be assured that everyone will be studying from the same page, as it were. For example, if someone reports an error in one of our textbook lists, we can make the change and everyone studying that list will get the fix. If you’re gradually building a particularly large list yourself, you can publish it early and have people get new words as you add them. All these changes will be reported to everyone studying the list on the given list’s page or on the study nav, so everyone is aware of the changes being made, and it won’t come as a surprise when your studies change because someone else edited a list.
In addition to this oft-requested feature, we’re also putting into testing the ability to give editing powers to other people, or even making a list editable by anyone. If you and a few other classmates want to put together a textbook list for your class, you can work together on it easily, each editing from their own account. And we’ll be interested to see what sorts of extensive lists get put together by the community as a whole.
Both published list editing and list editing permission controls are currently only available to beta testers.