2020 Connect-a-Thon Wrap-up

Question

Hi WikiTreers!

Our second Connect-a-Thon has come to an end. 

Our goal for the Connect-a-Thon was to decrease the number of profiles that are not connected to our big tree by spending 72 hours adding missing relatives to existing person profiles.

It was a wonderful weekend and a great success. Thank you to everyone who participated.  We love these events because they really bring our community together.

This year we added 60,123 relatives in 72 hours! Quite an accomplishment!

Here are some highlights from the event:

Top 5 Teams:

• Mighty Oaks – 8,434 relatives added.
• Team Roses – 7,463
• Team Virginia – 4,396
• Tree Nuts – 4,275
• Super Sweepers – 3,650

Top 5 Participants:

• Maddy Hardman – 1,625
• Jody Rodgers – 1,504
• Emma MacBeath – 1,460
• Steven Whitfield – 1,175
• Sandy Patak – 1,172

Top 5 by Team Average (number of team contributions divided by team members):

• Kiwi Crew – 332 per team member.
• Team Roses – 324
• Germany Genies – 296
• Spic-n-Span Scandinavians – 268
• Joyner Joiners – 246

Twenty-six teams participated and 15 of them broke 1,000! Four hundred and fifty two members participated – 22 of them broke 500 and 148 more broke 100!

Check out all the stats here.

Quick note: You can easily remove yourself from profiles you created but don't want to manage. Just go to https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:WatchedList and click on the "Watchlist Changes" button in the row, then select the link where it says "If you'd like to remove yourself from Trusted Lists that you've been added to just recently...click here" under "Remove yourself from Trusted Lists." 

Thanks so much to everyone who joined in and contributed to another fun, successful marathon.

Comments

Just a tiny question: I have a load of unconrected still in my list, which should have been connected this weekend. Are the numbers based on the script run after the deadline of the 'contest'?

I had fun anyway, seeing how fast one can add profiles to unknown branches.

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Wish I'd known about the Watchlist Changes function earlier.  That slowed me down taking the time to remove myself each time.   I guess that's what I get for not reading through the entire instructions!

Anyway, great Connect-a-thon.  Congrats to the winners and all who took the time to participate.

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Is there a way to determine how many disconnected branches were attached to the Main Tree?

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This is a great idea, Jiliaine. Thank you for suggesting it. I also asked a question about the largest tree in WikiTree that has the most connected profiles, and what percentage this is of the total WikiTree profiles.

Answer 1

Just a bit more numbers: Before the Thon started, we had about 82.84% of profiles connected to the Tree, now (after the first run through the database after the Thon) we are at 82,89%. This difference may not sound much, but it is a huge jump even on a three days basis.

Congrats to all of us!

Comments

Ah, that's what I was looking for. Thanks, Jelena!

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Hello Jelena. Thank you for this statistic if you multiply the 0.05% of the profiles times the total number of profiles on WikiTree, it comes out to a substantial number, even though it may not be a huge percentage. I assume that you are counting connections by marriage. It was very exciting to participate in the connect-a-thon when actually finding an existing tree. Do we have statistics on the size (number of profiles and percentage of total WikiTree profiles) of the largest contiguous network in the tree? How many profiles are in the largest tree?

Thanks again for your help with this.

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The connections get updated at 9am CET. It takes more than 1 hour. So, when I think of it (not the case every day) I divide around 11am the number of connected profiles within 100 degrees (available at the Global Connections page, currently 19+M) through the total number of profiles (available at the homepage, currently 24+M). Then take the result *100, and here you go.

I usually do that calculation in  the morning because during the day the total profiles number is updated constantly and the number of connected profiles only once a day.

Answer 2

Congratulations to EVERYONE who participated! What a great job was done adding all these new connections to our shared tree. 

Comments

Thank you for my participation in this, and helping me become a better contributor to wikitree.com.

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We're very happy to have people join us in these -thons as I think it really helps to create the sense of community. The Twisted Thistles thank you for your participation!

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Thank you, Bobbie and the other members for having me on the Twisted Thistles team. I enjoyed working on Scottish profiles, especially those of the nobility. I actually did connect some profiles to others that already existed. When that happens it is especially exciting. Being in Hawai'i the timing was such that my waking hours did not overlap as efficiently with those of the rest of the team, but I did the best I could with what I had.

Answer 3

Personally, I had a really great time.

I added about 100 profiles before I found a single connection. That made me nervous. But I ended up making a bunch of connections to the big tree, and I think all 180ish profiles I added are connected, along with the family I started with.

Comments

Chris, how do you immediately know when you've actually connected an unconnected person?  Does the little person go away real time?

Answer 4

After having major surgery on my right hand, I knew that I would not be a good contribution for another 6 weeks. Most children age four write better than I do with my left hand. I did have fun, and I was selective about the profiles. Two now connected profiles that people may be interested in their genealogical relationship with are crime victim Herbert Clutter and Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Finnis McCleery. Now I wish I could figure out who I gave an undeserved down vote to with my left hand.

Answer 5

Well, we did it. Now to sleep. Sleep is good. So good.

Nice work, everyone! I was with Team Canada and I was on one of the midnight streams. I think we did a great job. Keep up the good work. Now go to sleep!!

Answer 6

Superb WikiTreers All Around !!! 

A Personal Thank You To , Team Roses ! and Captain Emma MacBeath !! For Her Leadership and A Top 5 Finish (AGAIN !) 

C'est Bon Magnifique! 

Answer 7

Cool, I was on the Twisted Thistles but didn't really do much Scottish profiles. Mostly it was New Jersey & Pennsylvania. Mostly creating new profiles but I made a few connections to prior existing people- Peter Van Dyke Manners- added child & wife, parents- https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Manners-190

Merged duplicate of his sister, Cordelia- https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Manners-159

Added sons to Nancy Sumner & Nelson Keeney- https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Keeney-1150

Added wife, parents, daughter-in-law to William Bloomfield Vandegrift https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Vandergriff-28

Added Nahor Yard as child to parents- https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Yard-109

Added wife & son to Samuel Holcombe- https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Holcombe-226

Let me know if anyone is working on these branches. The only of those I mentioned is related to me (distantly) is the Yards, and the Keeney sons married Yard descendants.

Comments

Even if you didn't have many Scottish contributions we still very much appreciate that you joined the Twisted Thistles. As a new team (only our 2nd -thon) we did an amazing job, and every contribution by a member helps the tree.

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I'm a Wizard of Aus  and I worked largely on Scottish or English related profiles / families.  I didn't manage a Connection to the greater Tree until after the 'Thon, but I am so chuffed that I did it at all, let alone as soon as I did.  (I was expecting dozens more profiles and weeks of research, but it happened yesterday.)

As Bobbie says -  it doesn't matter which Team we're on, it's all about the Tree. 

Answer 8

I had multiple occasions where the system failed to identify that a profile already existed right as I was about to create. Later today I will have to go back and merge the list of profiles that I came across

Comments

I had at least one of those too.  Whoops!  I caught it and proposed a merge yesterday.

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I found at least 6 (all when I switched over to Western European aristocracy to fill in gaps within the families)

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I had several as well, all in the same family group - one had a slightly different spelling (Myers/Meyers), for two others the old profiles had no dates. Proposed all the merges as soon as I found out, too.

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Richard, I find that failure often on the new profile function.  I switched to now always use the separate search box at the top of the pages before even starting a profile and really scrub through potential existing profiles from the list.  The pop up boxes make it easier to check relationships now.

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I sent screenshot of side by side browsers to Jamie showing the exact same profile info was not showing a matching profile that I was about to duplicate but I caught it.  I definitely created at least one duplicate, so there are some bugs somewhere in the process.  Unfortunately, it is hard to find what is causing them, I assume.

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My problem appears to have been the opposite problem of not identifying an existing profile that was the correct one and a duplicate for the one that was being created.

I don't know exactly where to go with this suggestion for improvement in the filter of the profile-creation software, but when adding profiles, the system suggested many profiles that could not possibly correspond to the new profile because the existing birth dates were a couple of years before the marriage date of the new profile or the existing birth dates were after the marriage date of the new profile. It would help to save work by the software automatically eliminating impossible profiles based on marriage date. It would save time and effort not to have to examine and eliminate manually the impossible profiles. The software should take into account birth date, death date, and marriage date, if entered. If one of the three dates is unknown even the other two should be used to filter out any impossible profile.

Answer 9

As always, it was a blast! Thanks to everyone who participated! Thanks for inviting me to the LiveCasts, that was a lot of fun as well. See y'all at the next 'thon!

Answer 10

Can I just confirm that the Normalisation column on the tracker was doing a running average for each person and team all the way through?

You have the Kiwi crew in first place with the averages, which is great, but I need to confirm that those numbers came from the Normalisations column!!

Thanks for a great connect-a-thon, Kiwi Crew. I had a lot of fun!!

Comments

Yes, that is what the normalised numbers are from.

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Thanks Richard!!

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Hi, Robynne --

The Normalized Sum for the team is the number of contributions by the team divided by the number of active team members. (For the Kiwi Crew: 3320 / 10 = 332) It just averages out the total contributions per member and evens the playing field.

I'm no statistician, but I can see that for the number in the individual column, Aleš used this calculation:

total # of connections / team total * normalized sum for team

So, for yours, that would be:

109 / 3320 * 332 = 12 (because he rounded)

Maybe someone who is better at statistics than me can explain the significance of that number. Is it just a person's ranking if everyone were on the same size team???

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p.s. I just realized that I probably gave you WAY more information than you asked for. I'm still a little foggy. 

Answer 11

This was fun! I’m ready for the Next-A-Thon.

Comments

Source-a-thon in October!!

Answer 12

I enjoyed it, too.  I decided to work the Acadians Unconnected list.  I had no idea how many would turn out to be duplicates!  We went from 218 to 183 unconnected people and it will get better after all the merges complete.  These take a lot of research time so on Sunday I switched over to adding new family members using a census to get my numbers up a little.  All very satisfying.  And now I'm obsessed with the rest of the unconnected and worked on them all day yesterday too!

Answer 13

I had fun, too. And learned a bunch by seeing how much information and how many sources others were adding. Thanks to Jerry Baraboo for insight on how to add the numbers of sources already compiled on Family Search (e.g. 

20 Sources: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/LTZM-W7N)

Answer 14

One thing I have noticed is with the Connect-a-thon sticker:
2019: "[user] is participating with [team name] during the 2019 Connect-a-thon, and has added [number] connections."

2020: "[user] participated with [team name] during the 2020 Connect-a-thon, and has added [number] connections."

I used the exact same code changing 2019 to 2020 and added the appropriate connection number

Comments

Thank you for this suggestion. I tried it and it worked!