2023 "15 Nations Project" now accepting nominations! [closed]

Question

One of the many exciting projects coming to WikiTree in 2023 is the "15 Nations Project." We'll be releasing details of this project at a later date, but what we can say now is that the project will focus on 15 nations from around the globe which too often get overlooked in our typical genealogical activities. So which countries will the "15 Nations Project" be celebrating? That's still to be determined. As of today, there are 195 nations still in the running.

A number of factors will be going into the selection of the 15 Nations, not the least of which is community interest. Thus, we hereby open the floor to your nominations. Which countries would you like to see nominated and why? Do you have experience researching those countries? Would you be able to help us locate genealogical resources related to those countries? If not, that's okay, make your nominations anyway and we'll do our best to find the information we need to feature your choices.

Comments

All the suggestions so far are well deserved.  But I’m not too clear on what any decision would be based on.

Community interest is mentioned as one criterion. The Wikitree community now is mostly English speaking, so English speaking countries and those with, hate to say it, English colonial pasts are the best choice, i.e. Commonwealth countries. Similarly, Francophone and Hispanic nations would qualify.

Another factor is genealogical resources. Many countries nominated have none. Are they off the list?

Are we trying to attract more interest from past and present residents of underrepresented nations?

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These are good questions Robert. With this initial post, we have deliberately withheld details of the project as we do not want to influence members into making suggestions based on what they "think" our criteria are. We'll be announcing the full project within the next few days. In the meantime, here's what I can tell you:

- This will be a year-long project with a new country announced every three weeks. Those countries have not yet been selected, so once you see the full project you will still be able to make nominations.

- Non-English-speaking countries and those with limited or no records are still on the table.

- One of our goals is to attract members from these countries to WikiTree. It is also our hope to encourage greater participation from members who may have felt there has not previously been a place for their voice on WikiTree based on their ancestral heritage, as well as to expand the knowledge base of the WikiTree community at large. And finally, as with all WikiTree projects, we really just want you to have fun.

Stay tuned for more project details and the announcement of our first nation.

Answer 1

How about Pacific and other Island nations? The populations may be relatively small, however they seem to be under-represented on WikiTree.

Comments

Good chance we'll be making at least one stop there. Stay tuned.

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Yes I agree with Pacific Islands, ie: Tonga, Samoa, etc including Nz then there are all the smaller islands that make up the Pacific Islands.  Good suggestion.

Answer 2

I nominate Malaysia.  For a country with close to 33 million, we only have 596 profiles on WikiTree.  

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Malaysia_Genealogy

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Malaysia_Online_Genealogy_Records

I would like to be able to research my wife's side of the family.

Comments

I second nomination of Malaysia. Member of the British Commonwealth. Official language is Malay but English compulsory in schools and widely spoken. 33M population. Ultra modern nation good digital infrastructure. Would not be a stretch, with local volunteers, to get WT synched to government statistics and archives sources in order to facilitate genealogical research via internet from anywhere in the world.

Answer 3

I nominate Japan and China.

Comments

I vote for Japan as well. I believe this would be of interest to people of Japanese ancestry living outside of Japan, perhaps more than Japanese living in Japan. I have found that most people here are not that interested in their genealogy unless their family hands down important records from more than 100 years ago or the family was somehow powerful in the community. Also, records are somewhat hard to obtain. A lot of them are held at local temples, so searching often requires going in person to the rural location or the local city hall, submitting requests with a good reason, etc. Not sure about historical documents that are available in museums or libraries, especially university libraries, but that, too, would necessitate doing in-person research. There is the language question, of course, but I think this would be a great project to work on!

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Should we then not pay a little more attention to the fact that WikiTree doesn't accommodate their naming conventions (family name first followed by given name)? I'm still shuddering at "Zedong Mao". But perhaps having these countries profiled in this project would provide some motivation to address the problem?

Answer 4

India

1.3 billion people, and a large and active online community. 129 million Indians speak English as either a first, second, or third language, which means that they have very few barriers to participating in Wikitree.

Comments

I second India. The largest by measure of population of the British Commonwealth countries. Potential to be a great contributor to the WT global family.

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and they play cricket

More seriously. I note that when you put aside the Anglophone countries like UK and New Zealand, India is high in the list of source of immigrants to Australia. I expect that an 'India Project' could be easily synchronised with 'Australia Project'.

Answer 5

I'd love to see more focus on any of the African countries (minus South Africa which already has an active project) along with Jamaica, Haiti, and Dominican Republic. We need help from people with experience in these countries.

Comments

And, if Puerto Rico was a country, I'd nominate her. Sadly, we are kind of a stepchild project.

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Agreed, Pip. 

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@Pip, I agree.

Some common cultural and linguistic barriers can be addressed if Mexico and Argentina are included in the 15.

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Not ready to announce which countries we'll be selecting, but we will absolutely be visiting both Africa and the Carribean on our journey, as well as Latin America.

Does anyone want to propose a few specific African nations?

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I have personal interests in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Niger, and Zimbabwe.

Answer 6

Please consider Lithuania.

Comments

I second Lithuania.

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Another Lithuania vote. And, for selfish reasons, Poland.

Answer 7

Kazakhstan, because it is so important for y-DNA research. The Botai culture is credited for the first domestication of horses, and the Eurasian Steppe Route, a precursor of the Silk Road, was key in human migration. From the 7th century BCE until the 3rd century CE the Scythians were a great power and expanding power.

Attracting people from Kazakhstan to help us build their part of the single tree of mankind should be very interesting to many Eastern and Central Europeans, particularly if more people from Kazakhstan could be encouraged to do a yDNA test.

Comments

Wikitree will need a dedicated translator who can create a Russian language portal (if not a Kazakh language portal, which is a whole nother kettle of fish) before we can realistically expect to attract Kazakh users. As of 2023, Wikitree will be 15 years old and has only 3 language portals: Dutch, Afrikaans, and French.

Language Project (wikitree.com)

Wikitree will need language portals in (at minimum) Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, and Russian before we can hope to see people from the most underrepresented nations join us here.

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Language is certainly an obstacle the 15 Nations Project is struggling to overcome, and it goes beyond the ability to attract non-English speakers. We also have the problem of how English-speaking WikiTreers (which most are) can do adequate research in countries where English isn't the primary language. Of course there are a number of resources for translating such common languages as German or French, but how many Swahili-speaking WikiTreers are out there? Perhaps more than we realize. That's a portion of what this project hopes to work out.

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The first general census of the population of the Russian Empire in 1897 was the first and only nation-wide census performed in the Russian Empire.  Helping with language translation to use the census would assist with many areas under the control of the then Russian Empire in 1897.

Answer 8

A couple of years ago, I did some number crunching to try to determine which countries are most over-represented and most under-represented on WikiTree. (The numbers are in my answer in the WikiTree Dashboard thread from October 14, 2020.) I wasn't actually working from the full list of countries in the world, but rather the ten countries with the largest population, and ten more countries that I had been working in. (I will leave calculating the numbers for all the countries in the world to somebody who has way more time than I do.)

Anyway, out of that list of 20 countries, the most under-represented countries were:

Country	World Ranking	% of World Population	% of WikiTree Profiles	Profiles as % of Current Population	% of WikiTree as percentage of % of Population
China	1	17.97	0.01	0.00	0.05
India	2	17.50	0.07	0.00	0.39
Indonesia	4	3.45	0.01	0.00	0.31
Pakistan	5	2.82	0.00	0.00	0.12
Brazil	6	2.71	0.02	0.00	0.90
Russia	9	1.88	0.23	0.04	12.09
Mexico	10	1.63	0.29	0.06	17.55
France	20	0.86	0.50	0.18	57.70
Argentina	31	0.58	0.01	0.01	2.39

Comments

Thank you for that spreadsheet, Emma. Unlike most of the time when people send me links to Google Docs, I could see it without logging into a Google account, so yay! (Google locked my account years ago, claiming that I had violated their policy. Which policy? They won't tell me. Actually, they won't talk to me at all.)

With regards to Burkina Faso, do your numbers include searches for "Upper Volta" and "Haute-Volta"?

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@Greg, my search for these countries were based only on the name as it is in the spreadsheet, so we're definitely missing some profiles in the count if they are under different names or the names are written in a different language (with the exception of the ones that have a variation in parenthesis). I also didn't count any of the profiles with only Africa as the birth location which would add a good number to the total.

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@Emma, I don't know if you are already aware of it, but you might like to check the name variations for the African countries represented on WikiTree on https://wikitree.sdms.si/function/WTShowTable/Table.htm?table=Countries&filter=Africa.

One in particular that I think is worth noting is that most of the profiles on WikiTree from Zimbabwe actually use its previous name of Rhodesia, which I don't think is on your spreadsheet.

My understanding is that the report classifies a profile as being associated with a particular country if any of the birth, marriage or death locations are in that country. I assume that explains why the numbers in the report are much larger than the ones in your spreadsheet, which I guess uses just birth locations?

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Thanks for the chart @Paul. I see it's missing some important variations. I forgot, I did actually count Rhodesia and added it to the Zimbabwe total. I basically threw this spreadsheet together to get some sort of baseline going into 2023. There's lots of room for improvement.

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What about overrepresented countries? I was wondering how big of a percentage US profiles are. I'd expect it to be way over 50%, but I don't know if it's closer to 60% or to 95%.

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Actually, I was kind of surprised that the United States of America isn't the most over-represented country. Out of the countries I crunched numbers for, the most over-represented countries were:

Country	Population	Rank	Profiles	Score
Ireland	5,123,536	122	574,548	27.35097
New Zealand	5,136,061	121	413,951	19.6578
United Kingdom*	67,026,292	21	3,284,947	11.95362
Australia	26,020,285	53	1,273,508	11.93729
Canada	39,053,703	37	1,588,591	9.92124
USA*	334,192,760	3	13,492,259	9.847
Netherlands	17,777,460	67	678,252	9.30545
Germany	84,270,625	19	728,340	2.10802
Finland	5,528,796	114	47,607	2.10018
Belgium	11,761,737	82	62,783	1.31193
South Africa	60,604,992	24	315,488	1.26967

So the over-represented countries range from 2,735% of the profiles they'd have if they had 0.41% of the current population of that country (Ireland) down to 127% (South Africa).

* Neither the UK nor the USA has a single number of profiles in the reports, so I have to add up the number of profiles by constituent countries for the UK, and for states, territories, and the District of Columbia for the USA. Since I was focusing on under-represented countries this time, I didn't bother adding up all those this time, so I just re-used the numbers from two years ago. So both countries are probably more over-represented than this chart shows.

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Mind you, this should not be taken as a sign that people shouldn't work on Irish profiles anymore. If somebody were to do reports on the proportion of profiles of people born in a given country that are connected to the main tree, or fully sourced, Ireland would probably rank pretty low.

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I'm not surprised by the numbers. Those top countries have some very active projects.

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Oh so I was wrong, US profiles are "only" 41% of WikiTree?

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Uh, no. I wasn't measuring profiles in different countries as a percentage of total profiles. The 0.41% number comes from comparing the number of profiles on WikiTree by the estimated current world population. So a country where the profiles on WikiTree come to less than 0.41% of the current estimated population of that country is under-represented, and a country where the profiles on WikiTree come to more than 0.41% of the current estimated population of that country is over-represented.

On October 14, 2020, there were 24,813,446 profiles on WikiTree, of which 11,668,636 profiles were from the United States of America, so at that time, profiles from the USA came to 47% of all profiles on WikiTree. (Actually, that's probably an undercount, because there are way too many profiles that don't include the country. Some include the city or town and county/department/Länd/province/state/territory, some only include the town or city. If anybody were to go through and check every country in the world [including countries that don't exist anymore, like the Holy Roman Empire], we'd probably find that a fair percentage of profiles are "left over" because they don't actually have a country name. In fact, several of the Location Suggestions probably boil down, in many cases, to people not including the country name.)

Answer 9

Anything central America.

Comments

Central America will definitely be on our itinerary.

Answer 10

I nominate Armenia, Japan, China, India and Greece.

Comments

Yes if Armenia then we could research the Kardashians!

Answer 11

Is there a similar project for the Indigenous Native American Nations or can they be suggested here?

Comments

Wikitree has an active Native Americans Project.

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Thank you! Glad to know that.

Answer 12

I'm nominating a wildcard: Saint Helena. With a modern-day population of just over 4,400 people, this British Overseas Territory would seem to be an excellent candidate to achieve genealogical coverage on Wikitree. There's already over 10,000 profiles in the Wikitree category.

Category: Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha (wikitree.com)

With concentrated effort, could we achieve, say, 90% genealogical coverage for Saint Helena?

Answer 13

Latvia & other Baltic countries.

Answer 14

Please consider Malta.

It has a wealth of genealogical records going  back to the the 16th century. Many are digitised and available free online.

There however seem to be very few contributions on Wikitree by Maltese researchers, which is a great pity. Given it's small historical population size it should be realtively straightfoward for most people of Maltese descent to contect to each other and therefore the wider tree.

I believe there a great rewards to be had in pursuing Maltese research.

Answer 15

Regardless of what nations you choose, Wikitree needs to be more inclusive in terms of languages and naming conventions. Too often I have faced unsolvable issues relating to patronymics, from 19th century Norway Protestants  to 19th century Polish Jews. Different alphabets, and languages without alphabets, need to be included. English-language and Census-based research only gets us so far. Wikitree needs to get its technological house in order if it really wants to expand. How do you identify a person when you know neither his first name nor last, or he has no inheritied surname, but do know his children and parents? Somehow "Mr. Unknown Unknown" is unsatisfactory.

Comments

This is the best answer! I favor Brasil which has been mentioned below but know that my team of two is already doing more than many countries have. I've been very aware that with language and just slightly different naming standards are the largest reasons for people not to be collaborating on WikiTree (we have a decent number of unconnected profiles). I imagine the more different the customs, the larger this gap in collaboration and representation. We continue as a group to squabble over the middle name box - whether or not we keep it, how will we ever be more inclusive if we can't figure out a way to be flexible to other customs? This is a very common problem in the world where the desire to be inclusive is stifled by the impulse to keep things operating mostly the same.

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You make some very good points Adriana, as does Ken. This project will not have the authority/ability to alter WikiTree's standards and practices or to improve upon their technology. But, if successful, perhaps we will be able to motivate the powers that be to continue looking at these issues and finding solutions that work for people of all ancestries, cultures, and naming-practices.

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Thanks David! I didn't imagine the Project had that power, but I appreciate your response. I imagine there will need to be a good combination of manpower and accessible resources to make the ultimate selection viable for improved representation. I'm happy to see any of the named countries in this thread selected.

Answer 16

Hungary. The language barrier is great, for the amateur researching without help. And so many of us have people who came from there starting when it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through the more recent fleeing the communist/anti-religious regime.

Answer 17

I nominate Jamaica,which indeed is my home country,but also for other reasons.First the history of the Slave trade-and Jamaica being one of the major destinations of this.Jamaicans have a huge diaspora in many countries,the most obvoiuos being the U.K.,U.S.A. ,and Canada but also other Caribbean/Central American lands.

Jamaica has relatively accessible archives of Births,Deaths Marriages & Baptisms also.

Answer 18

Indonesia! The 4th most populous country in the world with over 700 different languages. They have 17,000 islands that span 1/10th of the Earth's equator and a very rich cultural heritage. They have an active online population. I would love to help and I'm sure I could get many Indonesians involved as well. I am an American but spent 13 years living there and plan to make a couple trips back over there in the coming year. With past Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese and British colonial presence there, I'm sure that many connections could be made from Indonesia to the rest of the world!

Comments

I second Indonesia. Despite the official language being Bahasa Indonesia, the official alphabet is 24 characters equivalent to the English (ISO-Latin) alphabet, leaving out X (taxi is spelled taksi) and Q (frequency is spelled Frekuensi). English taught in most schools. A population of 280M, mostly digitally savvy and connected 24/7/365 via smart phone and good coms infrastructure. Growing list of onlline availability of government records.

Answer 19

I suggest the Philippines.

Comments

I second Philippines.

Answer 20

I would like France. I am sure they will have plenty of records but few are accessible from the main genealogy sites and I think they possibly don't have as much a tradition with family history. Many existing wiki people will have French Ancestry but not know how to research them.

Comments

Linda, France definitely does have a great tradition in genealogy and family history, dating back to a time when America was not even a concept, and about every family has his/her dedicated genealogist. But this is maybe not visible from the "main" genealogy sites viewpoint, I suppose you mean Ancestry, FamilySearch etc.

French people use Geneanet for online genealogy, have access to French public records, and a wealth of local genealogy and history circles with often good online data bases. There is no need for French people with French ancestors to use the "main" (read US-based) genealogy sites. I barely never use them myself.

The main obstacle to the adoption of WikiTree in France is not a lack of interest in genealogy, but a wide cultural gap between French baseline genealogist, often rooted in local history, and the global view of WikiTree. Many french genealogists I've exchanged with don't buy the very concept of the "Single Tree".

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Completely agree Bernard. I recently showed two fully fleshed out Geneanet trees to my French MIL and purposefully didn't mention the one-tree effort here. Reason was cause her ex-husband, my FIL heard about my efforts here and was immediately not impressed and super skeptical. Family trees have a deeply personal and local meaning to French families. And I can understand and respect that but wiki tree serves a different purpose to me in light of French Diaspora, French colonization all over the world. And for one I see I'm not the only one who feels that way!

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I don't understand your message.  What do the abbreviations mean?

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MIL = Mother in Law; FIL = Father in Law

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Another crucial point in why French genealogists are not on WikiTree: the vast majority of them are older people, and they do not speak English. They are also not always comfortable with computers. I have talked about WT in my local genealogy club, but I have not pushed it, because I'm aware those are 2 big barriers that will drive them away. Just having an interface in several languages such as French would solve a big part of this issue.

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Linda, there is, and always has been, huge interest in family history in France. Because it was necessary to show proof of nobility to get access to official "charges" (lucrative pseudo-employment) and to the court, there have been professional genealogists in France long before the United States were even thought of. There are countless family genealogy books - some with hefty appendixes reporting "proofs" - since the early 17th century. Recording baptisms, marriages and later funerals has been mandatory since the 16th century so we do have lots of records and they can be very good. Some of them disappeared of course, but there's still plenty. And the France project actually has a programme designed to help newcomers to French genealogy learn how to use these records. True, we do not have many project members available to guide people through this programme, but there are so few people really interested that I'm sure we can manage.

The problem though, of people with "French ancestry" is that a lot depends on how recent that French origin is. For ancestors who migrated in the 19th or early 20th century, it's usually quite feasible to trace them back in France, and from there go several generations back. For migrants who arrived in New France in the 17th to early 17th century, it's unreasonable to expect going back more than 2, perhaps 3 generations. Let me not even go into the first wave of Huguenots. There are a number of claimed "French origins" which cannot be verified.

I agree with everything Bernard says. We have the tradition and the records. It just requires a bit more patience because most of our records are not indexed, and also, you have to keep in mind that our country was already large when yours was just beginning. Not all people with similar family names are related. People from different regions (before the 19th century) are usually not related.