About World Literacy

What it is

World Literacy is a set of flashcard decks for Anki that teach the working knowledge an educated person is expected to have about the world: where every country is and what it runs on, the events and people that shaped history, the machinery of money and power, how the world is actually doing, and the threads that tie all of it together. Every card is built from authoritative, freely available data — the CIA World Factbook, the World Bank, Wikipedia and Wikidata, and primary sources such as SIPRI, the IMF and the IEA — by generators that keep each card to one idea, prefer magnitude to false precision, and teach structure and exception rather than isolated trivia. This website renders the same cards as a browsable atlas, so the system can be explored as well as drilled.

The seven fields

The system is organised into seven fields. Each is its own deck (or set of decks) under one shared World Literacy root in Anki, so you can study the whole system or one field at a time. Counts below are read from the built decks.

… cards across the seven fields, shipped as one Anki package.

How it is meant to be used

1. Study in Anki, on your phone. Import the decks once; from then on, a few minutes a day is enough. Anki schedules each card for the moment you are about to forget it, so the time goes where it is needed.
2. Ten new cards a day. That pace keeps daily reviews to a comfortable size and takes you through the whole system in about a year. On a busy week, set new cards to zero and just clear the reviews.
3. Follow the ordered path. Study in the recommended order rather than at random: the calibration figures and the world overview first, then the regions in order of global weight, with history and people interleaved along the way, and a country's map, capital and flag arriving together. The order is set once, in Anki's new-card queue, and the schedule takes care of the rest.
4. Use this atlas as the reference layer. When a card raises a question, open the country here, follow its links into the events, people and threads that mention it, or search everything at once (Ctrl K). The atlas is for understanding; the decks are for remembering.

How it is built and verified

Every deck is generated by code from its sources, never typed by hand. Each card has a stable identity, so re-importing an updated deck updates the cards in place and keeps your review history. Figures that go out of date — arsenals, budgets, market shares — are tracked in a verification registry: each one carries its source, the edition checked, the date it was verified and a re-check cadence, and the build fails if a card's text drifts from the registry. Indicators that move every year, such as the Global Trends figures and country populations, are pulled live from the World Bank on every rebuild. The full registry, with the card each figure lives on, is on the Sources & verification page — … registered figures at the last build.