Help:Connection Checkers

Categories: WikiTree Help | Challenges

How to Play

Each week we post a Connection Checkers game starter in G2G.

This is an open invitation. Anyone can participate. Please join us! You can play competitively, dabble by checking a few connections, or just cheer for others as we strengthen our shared tree in a fun and social way.

To participate:

  #1. Answer the G2G post to say you'll give it a try.

  #2. Choose a connection path using the Connection Finder.

  #3. Verify each step in your connection path by confirming that every person along the path has a reliable source that connects them to the next person. This may be challenging! It may be impossible to verify some relationships and you'll need to choose a different path.

  #4. Announce that you have verified a path with a comment on your own answer on the G2G post.

At the end of the week, three players are declared the winners:

• The player who has the shortest verified path to one of the notables.
• The player who has the longest verified path to one of the notables.
• The player who verifies the most individual connection steps.

These players win bragging rights, a Connection Checkers Winner badge, and they go in the Connection Checkers Hall of Fame.

There will also be Profile Stickers for players who want to use them, including stickers for the total number of verified steps.

How to Verify Connections

Here is more about paths and how to verify them.

Hatfield-McCoy Connection Path

What is a connection path?

Over 85% of the people on WikiTree are connected to one another through family relationships. If you're connected, you have over 33 million family members (!) including the featured notables for this week. If you're not connected yet, add your relatives and you'll probably connect soon.

You can see how you connect to anyone else on the tree with the Connection Finder. It will display the "connection path" — the trail of family relationships — between you and the other person. Each relationship, such as a mother to a child, or a husband to a wife, is called a degree or step on the path.

How to verify steps on a path

Sources are required on WikiTree. We ask all contributors to say where information they're putting on WikiTree comes from. This is essential for productive genealogy collaboration.

However, some sources are incomplete or impossible to verify. Information about families is often passed down through the generations informally and the original source for information is lost to time. Ideally, we want sources that are reliable and verifiable. See Help:Reliable Sources for more explanation.

This is the Connection Checkers challenge: can you verify each relationship along a chosen connection path with a reliable source?

For example, if your path runs through a husband and wife, is there a marriage record? If your path runs through a mother and daughter, is there a birth certificate? Even a single census record showing relationships between family members in the same household can count for Connection Checkers.

To show that a relationship has been verified:

1. Make sure there is a source citation. If there is one already, you just need to check it.
2. Mark the Relationship Status indicator as Confident. On parent-child relationships, this is done on the child's profile. For siblings, it is done by confirming the relationship of each child to their shared parent(s). It is not currently possible for spouses but will be in the future.

Connections through private profiles of living people and the recently-deceased do not need to be verified for the purposes of the game.

Choosing a path

There are an almost infinite number of different relationship paths between you and any other person. In this game, you can choose to verify any path between you and one of the week's notables, or verify multiple paths.

By default, the Connection Finder will show you the shortest connection path. Players usually start by attempting to verify their shortest connection to one of the notables.

You can exclude any person along a path with the little "X" you will see in their box. That will reroute the path around them. This might be necessary if you can't verify their relationship to the next person.

Some players also like to see if there is a biological relationship path. You can use the Relationship Finder to see if there is a path that does have any connections through marriage. If there is, there may be multiple paths through different common ancestors. Check for an "Explore More" selection box below your relationship path.

Keeping Score

To be eligible to win for the shortest or longest connection path, simply post a comment on your original answer in G2G specifying the path and how many verified steps are on it. It doesn't matter if you or someone else found or verified the source for a relationship as long as you have confirmed that it's Confident. (See above for more about verification.)

Some participants like to show the relationship steps in their G2G post and track which steps have been verified. We will add tips on easy ways to do this in the future.

Counting verified relationships

Players who want to compete on the number of steps they verify should use the "Connection Checkers" checkbox on the Challenge Tracker. A link to the tracker appears after you edit a profile.

Add a point for yourself if you have either found a source for the relationship and/or marked the relationship as Confident after checking the source. Do not add a point if the relationship already has a reliable source and is already marked as Confident. It's great to doublecheck the source and confirm what it tells us, but unless you're the one who edited the profile, it's possible someone else already counted a point for verifying it.

If you're playing the game, you are encouraged to count all the relationships you verify. They do not need to be part of a path that is posted in G2G. Moreover, you are invited to count:

• Relationships you verify in other players' paths. Helping others is strongly encouraged!
• Relationships you verify while choosing and growing connections for next week's notables. These will be valuable pre-verified connections in the paths of players next week, so please count them!

Asking for Help and Helping Others

Connection Checkers is a way to make genealogy research more fun and social. We may be competing to have the shortest and longest verified paths, but WikiTree is really about collaboration, not competition. We all share the same mission.

The WikiTree community has a long record of being amazingly generous and helpful.

How to ask for help

If you can't find a source to confirm a connection or just don't know where to begin, reach out for help!

Look for the Connection Checkers Help button on the profile of the person whose relationship you're attempting to confirm. Be sure to give as much detail as possible about where you have looked. You might also create a Research Notes section on the profile.

Note that this can only be done on public profiles that others can see.

How to give help

Thank you for wanting to help others! Members like you are the soul of our community. Your generosity is one of the primary reasons we have been successful in growing a collaborative family tree.

Questions posted using the button described above appear in the Genealogy Help section of G2G with the connection_checkers tag.

You might want to follow this tag. These questions also appear in the Connection Combat Discord channel, so if you participate there you will see them.

Whenever you are able to help someone by adding a source and confirming that a relationship is Confident, be sure to enter a point for yourself in the Challenge Tracker.

Thank you again!

Live chats

We have a special Discord channel where you can chat in real-time with other players.

Join in that channel here.

Hall of Fame

See past winners in our Connection Checkers Hall of Fame.

Here is the archive of a previous version of our connection game: Connection Combat Hall of Fame.

Stickers

Participation Sticker

There is a sticker for our Connection Checkers players. You can add it to your profile.

... ... ... is participating in the Connection Checkers game.

Here's the code for the sticker: {{Community Event |image=WikiTree_Event_Images-35.png |text=is participating |event=Connection Checkers game}}

Winner Stickers

... ... ... had the shortest path in the Asian and Pacific Islanders in the Connection Checkers game.

... ... ... had the longest verified path in the Asian and Pacific Islanders in the Connection Checkers game.

... ... ... had the most verified paths in the Asian and Pacific Islanders in the Connection Checkers game.

This page was last modified 16:01, 4 June 2024. This page has been accessed 2,158 times.