We need to "tidy up" our flashcards!
The Flashcard section of this site is an excellent tool for learning and practicing our vocabulary. I have spent a bit more time than usual in this area over the past few days.
Although there have been some excellent new flashcard sets created over recent months, I kept encountering similar problems over and over.
Quentin has created a great reference article about this topic. I thought I would bring it to everyone's attention in the forum again. I know I am going to go back and check my sets and clean them up. I think if we all do this, following his guidelines, the flashcard section will be much more profitable in the future. 
Does anyone agree? 
Flashcard Reference Article
11 Answers
I have recently started creating flashcards sets and are designating them as private. I have noticed that almost all of my sets are being designated as "faves" meaning that other users are able to access them. It doesn't bother me that they can be accessed even though I designated them as private but I made them private since I am a beginner and therefore likely to make mistakes and I certainly didn't want to mislead any other user with my flashcards.
Maybe other users created flashcards to be used only by themselves but due to some fluke in the software, they are available to all? Is there any way to look into this?
Also, do users tend to send a PM to the owners of flashcards with errors? I certainly wouldn't mind being notified of an error.
So on a scale of 1-10 how reliable would you guys say it is to trust the flash card sets, as a beginner? I don't think I would notice mistakes on the cards if there were any, so should I just stick to the lessons then?
Wait, I thought of somehting else to complain about. I think most users are hitting the submit button over and over again while the system is processing their flashcard set, because many of the exact same sets show up two or three times. Sometimes more.
Dogbert said:
Enough complaining for today.
If we're being cranky...
I find it confusing when a set uses articles for some of the nouns and not for the others. I have enough problems remembering the words, let alone, which ones contain articles.
There, I'm done, and I feel better. 
Thanks for pointing this out again, Nicole, actually I followed Quentin's directions to create my first sets which were a disaster , they were checked by Quentin and had a lot of inconsistencies.
If you create sets, do have a look at the guidelines he points out in his article, they are really useful
Most of the user sets are complete garbage. I would say that one in twenty, at best, is actually done correctly (with tildes, accents, articles, and differentiation between nouns and verbs). Articles are important in Spanish so it's helpful to have them attached to the nouns in the flashcards. Most users don't even bother to proofread or check if the translator brought over the correct word. The translator can get confused if the same word exists in both languages. Of course, it doesn't help that many of the English words are not input correctly by the users to start with.
Another common annoyance is sets containing multiple words that have the same meaning (or vice-versa).
Enough complaining for today.
The flashcards with teh lessons work well for me. I'm not aware of any other flashcards on the site. There is an actual flashcard site elsewhere that you have to pay $20 or $30 to have full access.
I am not sure if my sets would come up the same way. I intend mine to be private because I was never able to figure out how to do tildes with them.
Does anyone think we should "gently" help and remind those whose sets have problems in them?
I would be grateful if someone pointed out any problems with my cards. I'm sure I have some mistakes that need to be dealt with.
Perhaps a nice PM could be helpful.
Another good question from Alice:
Also, do users tend to send a PM to the owners of flashcards with errors? I certainly wouldn't mind being notified of an error.
I have never heard of anyone pointing out mistakes. Heidi offered to check my sets out months ago and made some corrections. But I am not aware of anyone else pointing out mistakes to others.
I would also be grateful if someone pointed out my mistakes. 
Alice said:
Maybe other users created flashcards to be used only by themselves but due to some fluke in the software, they are available to all? Is there any way to look into this?
I'm not sure if anyone is aware of this problem. That would explain several sets that had confusing titles. Some sets were labeled as "Capitulo Uno" or "Group 3". To me, that looks like something the creator did in order to organize things for their own personal use. No one else would know by the title, what these flashcards were all about. We will have to see if anyone knows anything about this or check with the administrators.
