"Thon" suggestion: Link-A-Thon

Question

I was working on the Unconnected Notables page today, and I realised that about half of the notables listed on that page are unlinked. That is, they don't have any parents, spouses, or children listed on WikiTree. So, I did a search, and learned that  there are 6,215 unlinked notables listed on WikiTree. Granted, that's only a small fraction of the 1,179,809 unlinked profiles on WikiTree, but our "5 star profiles" are more likely to be notables, and any time somebody does a search on an unlinked notable and ends up on WikiTree, they're probably not going to be terribly impressed with our site.

Now, I get it that connecting a profile can be a long and complicated process. It took me ages to connect my branch, and we have notables with up to 217 profiles in their branch who still aren't connected to the main tree. (Actually, there may well be unconnected notables with even more profiles in their branch, because not all unconnected notables on WikiTree have been added to that page yet.) So asking people to connect every unconnected notable in one weekend (or even to try) would be a bit much. However, it seems to me that having a challenge to provide at least one link (parent, spouse, or child) to each unlinked notable on WikiTree could be very doable. (It might even be finished in a single day.)

Of course, if people manage to find more than one link per notable, that would be great. But even if people only manage to find one link per notable, that would still double the chances of finding a connection to the main tree, since there would be two people to find connections for in each branch, rather than one. 

(And, if we do manage to provide a link for every unlinked notable, we could have another challenge to move each notable branch with two profiles up to at least three profiles, and so on. The ultimate goal, of course, is to connect them all to the main tree, but breaking that task up into bite sized chunks should make it much less intimidating, and therefore more people should be likely to take part in it, so it gets done faster.)

Comments

This is an interesting idea for a 'Thon. I really like how you broke it down into "chunks" that are more achievable.

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I didn't look at your space or anything, but I suggest you do a monthly "Can You Help Connect These Notables" and list 5-10 profiles. Other projects have done something similar with great success. Lots of people are willing to help in small ways, it is harder to get people to work long term if there is a lot of work to be done. You could even categorize them into whether they were scientist, sports legends, doctors, or religious figures. Or you could maybe do a weekly challenge to match the category of those featured profiles. This week is Thanksgiving profiles. That would probably not be good, but last week was 007 and you could have done actors, or even 007 actors that are not connected.

I would still participate if it became a seasonal "Thon," rest assured your original idea is good, I was just adding some more suggestions for you to ponder.

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When does it update as I did some work on Walter Nash then noticed he is already connected? Is there a way to find out when someone got connected and how?

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Well, I picked a low hanging fruit on the first page (figuring it would not be too hard to find parents for an American born in 1914...) and bingo: there were already connected parents somewhere else... https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Tillman-318

Meanwhile, I'm removing PPP for non-project profiles in the first few pages. This should significantly improve their chances of finding parents.

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Kylie, if there's a way to get automated notifications of branches being connected, I don't know of it. So I have to work through all the lists of unconnected branches as I have time. But the privacy on that page is set to Open, so if anybody finds a notable who has been connected (and if you feel comfortable editing tables), by all means go ahead and edit the page to show that.

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Thank you, Isabelle, both for connecting Tillman, and for removing protection from non-project profiles.

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Lucy, Greg has already posted several of these "Can you help connect..."-challenges. There got numerous people connected by those challenges.

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Yes, 'comfortable editing tables' - I'm getting there lol!  Cheers, I'll have a look at those NZ ones.  Much appreciated.