April 2022 Connect-a-Thon Wrap-up

Question

Hello WikiTreers!

Our fifth Connect-a-Thon event has come to an end.

Our goal was to bring the world closer together by connecting more people on our big tree. To do this we spent 72 hours adding missing relatives.

The weekend was so much fun, and a great success! Thank you all for participating and helping grow our global tree. These grand shows of community are just amazing!

We added 84,388 profiles over the weekend! Here are some highlights from the event:

Top 5 Teams: 

• Virginia Connectors
• Mighty Oak Roots
• Mighty Oak Branches
• Germany Genies
• Team Roses

Top 5 Participants: 

• Jim Loden of the Cornbread Catchers
• Sandy Patak of Team Virginia
• Steven Whitfield of the Mighty Oaks
• Jack Graham of Team Virginia
• Emma MacBeath of Team Roses

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

• Germany Genies (267)
• Virginia Connectors (253)
• Mighty Oak Roots (214)
• Team Italy (198)
• Tree Bolts (187)

Thirty-three teams participated including the new Wales team, the Welsh Dragons! An incredible twenty-six of those teams added more than a thousand profiles!!! Little Team on the Prairie almost reached that, getting an even 900!

Check out all of the stats here.

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Tip: 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." 

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Thanks to each and every one of you that joined in and contributed, helping make this a successful and fun marathon! See you next time!

Answer 1

Thank you to all you Wonderful WikiTreers!

What are some interesting finds from the weekend?
https://twitter.com/azurerobinson/status/1518679242996948992

Comments

Here's mine
https://twitter.com/azurerobinson/status/1518679242996948992
about: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Ciranko-4

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Here's mine:

Pvt Ernest Spencer, Yakama Indian, WWI Hero and Distinguished Service Cross recipient.  

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Spencer-25043

Shared on Twitter 

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Great profile, Sandy! Thanks for sharing!
az :)

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I am 20 degrees from Pvt.  Spencer   through marriage. Nice very nice profile Sandy.

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Wow.  What a great story.  It connects with me as I live in WA state, not too far from Toppenish.

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A few profiles I added created a new connection path reducing the distance from my ancestor Jean Joseph Vatant to my 7th cousin Suzanne Gardahaut from 13 degrees to 11.

Both profiles are monitored in the 100 Circles study, and by this simple shortcut, the mean distance of all connected profiles to/from Jean-Joseph has dropped from 32.3 to 31.7.

Might look like peanuts, but considering this mean distance is computed on over 25 million distances, it's actually a huge tectonic event.

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Awesome, Bernard! Thanks so much for sharing :) az

Answer 2

Hi Mindy,

A couple of questions if I may:

1. How many new profiles get added to WikiTree each day normally?

2. While we added 84K+ over the weekend, how many other profiles were added by users not participating in the Connect-A-Thon?

kind regards..Nigel

Comments

At the current rate of growth (about 4 millions profiles each year), roughly 11,000 prifiles are added per day. So 84,000 profiles in 3 days is clearly a significant spike.

I, for one, added about 100 new profiles during the weekend and did not participate in the Cat event.

I guess that most of the top regular contributors did participate, so there probably weren't that many profiles added by non-participants.

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I'm checking on that for you Nigel. Good questions!

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You can examine the profile additions to the wikitree here: https://wikitree.sdms.si/default.htm?report=stat1&dataID=11&Year=0 (Click Get table)

That shows weekly additions to the tree excluding unlisted profiles. So I would say 9000-10000 new profiles daily. You can see the connect-a-thon spike in January and in august last year.

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Thank you

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About 10,000 more a day are connected to the Single Tree, either new ones or previously unconnected ones. About the same number as profiles created, we have a sort of steady state in the number of unconnected, new unconnected branches are created while old ones are connected.

See this discussion https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1364794/connection-facts-and-figures for more thorough analysis of those figures.

Answer 3

This was my first connect-a-thon and I thoroughly enjoyed the cameraderie and helpful hints provided by other team members on discord. I didn't know about the YouTube stuff until the very end but I will know to check in for that next time. One question I have is how can some people add so many profiles? I worked my butt off adding profiles with sources all weekend, and that meant a contribution of 137. How are people able to add 1000+ profiles over 3 days?

Comments

I'm always amazed at the top scorers too. How do they do it? Some team leaders were talking about this via email this morning. One, Debi McGee, explained the exact method used by one of the contributors on her team. It includes weeks of preparation, and months of work after the event. During the event, he just uses one source and doesn't go down rabbit holes. But then for months after the event he improves those profiles he created and adds more sources. That's impressive dedication.

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Another thing utilized by some of the 'top' scoring WikiTreers are the tools at hand. You can find them on the Help: Apps page. Using things such as WikiTree-X, WikiTree BEE, & WikiTree Sourcer can really speed up your ability to create a profile. There is no 'cheating' about it, they still have to do the work. But, it helps them save time on the mechanics of it and concentrate on making sure they don't create duplicates, and that whole families are represented. You should check them out, if you haven't already! 

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I was also, until I tried it myself: Using the "add source from previous profile" feature of WikiBEE together with Windows 10's clipboard history I was basically able to create profiles from a printed family book in one edit without the need to explicitly post-process them. The last two hours on Monday with this were pretty exciting, but also pretty hectic. I'm glad that I can do "normal editing" again finally today, since I also had to "fill up" the club 1000 badge I was so close to after the Thon.

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Not just dedication, but has his work cut out for him months in advance.

But I still don't see how they can be added this quickly... even if you had them all lined up ready to go. The marathon was over 72 hours but let's presume each person sleeps for 18 hours over those 72 hours, which leaves 54 hours = 3,240 minutes. Not even allowing for toilet breaks etc, that means 3 minutes only per profile for 1,080 profiles. It just seems superhuman.

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Thanks Mindy. I wasn't suggesting cheating, but was thinking it must be with the help of some software or computer programs. My thoughts are not how useful this would be for the next marathon, but how useful this might be for adding in profiles and sources at any time. I'll go and look at those apps.

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I don't know what WikiBEE is, but will definitely be checking it out.

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When I was in the groove on Monday noon, I think I was at some 1 or 2 minutes per minute. I don't know how long I would have been able to hold on and assume that after some hours the error rate will increase dramatically, but it's humanly possible for sure. I will do "proper profiles" in the next Thon anyway ;)

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Typing fast really really helps. I type about 60-70 words a minute and I literally type nonstop for three days, only sleeping about 6 hours each night. I don't do any prep work except I keep a list of families I have worked on who I need to later go back and add kids or parents and siblings because I run out of time. Knowing the families helps so when I look up the records during the thon, I know which records belong to them. I use Family Search and Ancestry simultaneously because FS doesn't search very well any more. Which means I use the Sourcer app for Ancestry citations. I also use a text expander extension for words I type all the time. Those are my secrets.

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@Emma: Text expander sounds interesting. Is it this one? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-text-expander/

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@Florian, I use Chrome. The extension is called Magical. However, I imagine any text expander extension will work. I use mine all the time to type certain WT templates and words I type every day.

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Crikey that's fast! Isn't that like a professional typist? I can't do anything like that fast. And if I tried I would make a huge number of errors. I'm not sure what a text expander is.. is that like predictive texting?

Well thanks everyone for all the tips!

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I have done professional transcribing in the past (not a fun job!) 

Text expander allows you to set certain key phrases to type the rest of the word for you. For instance, when I type "{{Afr" it will finish it for me with {{African-American Sticker}} It saves me several keystrokes when I type the same thing repeatedly and it's faster than copy/paste. During the Connect-A-Thon, I was working mostly in Mississippi, and I kept misspelling it, so I set it to "Miss" to finish the word for me (spelled correctly )

Answer 4

Just wondering how many "unconnected" profiles got connected during the event.   

4,559,931 person profiles remain unconnected  

From 2020 we had a result 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%.

Comments

No Robin. On Thursday before the Thon we were at 84.74% connected profiles (Connected profiles / created profiles). Now we are at more than 84.75% (I won't be able to check the correct numbers today as I am on tour and am not online at about 10.30, when the database finally ran through). Although an increase of .01 percent doesn't seem much, it is a huge increase. Usually we need longer for that.

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Thanks Jelena!   If we look at the difference between 2020 and 2022, there is almost a 2% increase in connected profiles!

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Robin, I don't think an acurate number of Connections to the global wikitree can be determined because there were other things happening at the same time as the Connectathon.

For example, it is estimated that about 10,000 new profiles are added each day (including by gedcoms), so that would be about 30,000 for the weekend with undetermined connection status. Besides the usuall profile creations, merges, and work by Connectors who were not involved in the Connectathon.

Answer 5

As a first timer doing the Connect-a-Thon, I was unable to give the time I originally planned for the weekend. It was enjoyable and I did make a few of the live youtube events that occurred. Overall I had a great time, and it was nice to interact with other Wikitreers.

I am curious as to how many of the overall profiles created during the event were contribute by first time event joiners?

Comments

I don't know the amount of profiles created, but I can tell you that we had 786 participants for the April thon, 290 of which were new (they didn't participate in January). This means over a third of the April participants were newcomers to the 2022 Connect-a-Thon. That is amazing!

Answer 6

While I was proud to contribute as best I could to my Might Oaks Team (Branches), my sincere congratulations to ALL of my WT compadres!