Connectors Project Ideas

Question

Hi Connectors!

I have been talking with one of our project members, Carol, and she had a few ideas that sound like they'd be a nice for the project. I'd love to hear if any of you have some, too, and also want to run some thoughts by you to see what you think.

* Some of you are great with certain geographical areas. Would you use categories set up like the Unsourced categories are, with the Unconnected people you come across broken down geographically? We could employ a template like is used in Unsourced with the added category to put someone in specific regions for ease of finding them to work on.

* Do we want to set-up Free-Space projects to organize who is working on various regions or surnames? They can be landing places for those who share similar interests in working on those unconnecteds. Or we can post who is heading up the effort for a certain category on the category page and just use G2G for discussion, while posting helpful sources or sites on the category page?

Do you have any ideas? I think many of us have been newly motivated by the ability to see the Unconnecteds in our own watchlist-thanks, Chris for that! What do you think about these?

Comments

Great ideas, Abby and Carol! I love the work of the Connectors. It's so valuable for our mission -- and selfless.

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Agree with Abby. Seeing the Unconnecteds in our own watch list not only is an excellent motivator but its also inspired us to plunge forward  to look for bits and pieces of our ancestral chains that we aren't quite ready to connect. Nice, Chris!

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Thanks for putting this list together, Abby and Carol!

I would definitely use regional categories.

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I would use regional categories

A blog site where one could communicate with others who understand the issues associated with "connecting" would be wonderful.

I don't use the unconnected list - rather I build trees by making name searches in wikitree to find those I know from research elsewhere, ought to be connected.

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We now have a Dutch Roots Challenge every month, the first two were all about connecting , so yes we love to connect and have added the challenges to the connector challenge list already, two proud Wikitree members have a connectors badge right now :) 

And with the new connectors tool it's even more fun, we picked two families who could use some help, so now with this new tool we could pick maybe some of the most unconnected ones and try to get them connected again , it's great fun and sometimes people are connected already in a few hours (really exciting and great fun to see the: '' there are no unconnected ... Yay !'' message :D and really motivating to see how fast people are connected again sometimes !

The unconnected by region or country could work I think , like the unsourced by country category we could of course add the unconnected by country or region categories as well . And if they all can be found in a specific Free space project is of course an idea that could work, than all we have to do is go there , pick a profile and try to connect it (or that family) to our tree :)

And Abby thanks for the templates ..we absolutely love them :D

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Last month we had a challenge to connect Irish President Éamon de Valera to the Wikitree. I tried, never found a connection, though did find a number of distant American inlaws that might prove useful. If this couple, John and  Pieternella (Gabrielse) Brasser from the Netherlands to New York could be connected, that would get the de Valera lot connected.

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Brasser-25

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Interesting and some familiar names, we were searching a lot in the Zeeland archives for the last challenge, adopted them for the project so we will try to connect them of course :)

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super - do let us all know if you manage this, there were very few leads to follow for this individual

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@ Valerie (and others) I think they are connected now , found a profile for his mother and added his father, mother already was connected, so now Janus Jacobs Brasser and his family and descendants if I'm correct should be connected as well :) We'll know for sure within the next 24 hours eeh :D

By what I found so far it looks like his father Jacob Maartense Brasser (so his parents) were the ones emigrating and they (children and wifes) all went together (5 children are mentioned) But still looking for more of course.  

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I love the idea of setting up Free-Space projects to organize who is working on various regions or surnames.  Will you do it!!  I hope!!

Pat

 

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Re finding connections for Éamon de Valera -

That's super, thought I saw others nearby that may have been related - you won an Irish challenge! Wonder what Dev would have made of that? Better than an English connection - wee giggle here.

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Whoo hoo that's awesome, don't get the chance to connect a real president  every day eeh :D (almost can't wait 24 hours and hope I'm not mistaken of course :P)

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Thanks to our Dutch community - Éamon De Valera, past President of Ireland is now connected to the WikiTree - he is Éamon is 36 degrees from Kevin Bacon, 37 degrees from Alex Haley, 38 degrees from AJ Jacobs, 36 degrees from Maureen O'Hara and 37 degrees from Queen Elizabeth II of the Commonwealth Realms.

 

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Lot of fun connecting Éamon De Valera for the Ireland Project, if you have more of these just tag dutch_roots and our members can help connect them , we all love a challenge ! :D 

Answer 1

Thank you Abby, for putting these ideas out to the wikitree community, and I agree totally with the need for motivation as well. When you connect a profile to the global tree, (one that isn't on your own watchlist), you have no idea how many other profiles get connected at the same time. But maybe an easy addition to the Connection Finder page would be a single line under A.J.'s box showing how many profiles are on wikitree and what percentage are connected to A.J. The 'Connectors' could then work towards increasing this percentage figure.

Comments

Oooh, putting that percentage somewhere would be fun. The number connected shows up when you use the actual AJ connection link in the drop down menu from the Profile number at the top of a profile page, but some percentage, maybe even something that we Connectors Leaders could manually update once a week or something would be fun. We're at 67% right now.

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Glad you agree Abby, hope it can be done as I'm sure others would be interested as well. Have been wondering how to select my Sussex unconnected people to work on, and have decided that I'll choose profiles whose managers have the highest contributions, as shown on their home page. I know that some will be working on one-name and one-place studies, but many will just have uploaded their own tree so I should get quite a high hit rate. And I'll be adding sources as I go, and initiating merges where necessary as well, so the profile that joins onto the global tree should be well documented. Hope that all sounds OK..

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That's a great approach, Carol. I might put that tip somewhere, as it's a good idea for fast connections.

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Great iea! I'd like to see that number displayed prominently, too. I am of the impression that we get lots of new unconnected profiles all the time. Not just the ones created in efforts to connect the unconnected, perhaps many coming in with GEDCOMs. Such that even as we work to connect them, they might be coming in just as fast. Faster, even.

It can't be just me who's constantly running into unsourced, unconnected profiles filled with GEDCOM gobbledygook often with no more than 1 of 25 lines adding even a scintilla of additional information. I probably connect maybe a couple every day, but that's slow progress on nearly 3 million!

Answer 2

First of all, I really like the idea of categorizing by region. I often will visit the Illinois category for the Unsourced profiles. Seeing a subset of profiles make it seem less overwhelming!

Another suggestion is to have monthly challenges like they do for Sourcerers. It seems like that draws in quite a few participants -- and, actually, I would imagine that effort helps to connect profiles, too! Maybe a combined effort of some sort?

Comments

I have been thinking on more connection challenges, too, Julie. What I was thinking was varying the challenge each month. Maybe focus on connecting some of the singleton profiles hanging around out there. Or another month have a race to see who can connect a certain orphan tree the fastest. I think we still have QuestLove unconnected from the GFR, so he could be another to work on. Or using these new category breakdowns to do them-US connection month. Or German connection month. Just to keep everyone on their toes ;-)

Next month is Notevember, which is one Connection challenge, focused on Notable connections. Actually, that's another idea, which is focusing on the unconnecteds in various projects each month, too.

I need to work on setting up some categories, it sounds like. Good thing the weather's getting colder here :-)

Answer 3

For some time now, I've been chewing on the idea of doing a "Connectors Challenge", similar to the "Sourcerers Challenge", which has been great at motivating people to add sources to profiles.

Basically, it would work in a similar way, with a couple of changes, since the goal, while related, is a little different. Here's a possible announcement for it (assuming that there's a leader willing to steer something like this) based on the "Sourcerers Challenge" announcement:

We invite you to take part in the Connectors Challenge. You can help the Connectors Project to link all the unconnected profiles on WikiTree into the main family tree. To take part, do the following:

1. Pick any WikiTree profile which is not connected to the main tree. (In other words, that profile does not have a box at the bottom of the page, showing the degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, Alex Haley, AJ Jacobs, Maureen O'Hara and Queen Elizabeth II of the Commonwealth Realms.) You can look for unconnected profiles using the Unconnected People tool or the Global Family Reunion's Unconnected Trees Project, or you may run across an unconnected profile in the regular course of your research.
2. Either add a new profile for a first degree relative (parent, spouse, sibling, or child) of the person on that profile, or else connect an existing profile on WikiTree which should be connected to the profile you're working on.
3. Add a source to the profiles on both sides of the connection (or only one, if privacy settings keep you from editing the other) showing the connection between the two profiles. This could be a census record listing a family, a marriage record, a dath record listing the spouse and/or parents, a birth record listing the parents, or any source which demonstrates that the two profiles should be connected to one another. Your source needs to be cited as closely to the recommended Sources help page as possible to count towards your tally.
4. If you are adding a new profile, add a second, independent source for that profile. (For example, if you add a spouse because of a marriage record, then look for a birth or death record for the spouse you're adding.) (Note: The reason for this rule isn't to discourage you from adding people. But as you have probably already learned, even official documents frequently misspell names, so adding an independent confirmation of the name helps to save other researchers time in trying to find records that don't exist, because the person's real name was not the same as showed up in the linking document.
5. Answer this post, creating a numbered list, and including the two profiles and the kind of source you used to make the connection. (For example: "1. Smith-123 to Jones-456 - marriage".) (You only need to reply once. If you make more connections later in the month, just edit your post to add your new connections.)
6. If you make a connection which connects either an isolated profile or an unconnected tree to the main tree, please add "Connected!" at the end of the line which made the connection. 

• The tally is of profiles connected, not sources added. That said, if you can add a number of sources to a profile, all the better.
• If either or both profiles you connect did not have good sources before, then you can also count those sources towards the Sourcerers Challenge.

Of course, we'd need some kind of Connectors Challenge winner badge, to award to whoever makes the most connections in a month. And probably a participant badge for everyone who takes part.

Greg

 

 

Comments

Oooooo, that sounds fun :-) We could run optional themes with both, too. I've been tossing around the idea of adding focus every once in awhile. If we ran them concurrently, but with separate start/end dates, I could probably juggle both, if another Leader doesn't want to take it on. Like the 15th to the 15th for the Connectors. Otherwise, I'd have two full days of tallying points right at the beginning of every month. We'll see if another Leader wants to step in, first, but if not in the next couple weeks, I'll see about setting it up.

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So glad you brought this up, Greg!

Since we have Special:Unconnected that parallels the Unsourced category, a challenge that parallels the Sourcerers Challenge makes perfect sense. The Sourcerers Challenge has been so successful. Connectors have Connection Combat but it's usually over so quickly.

This post motivated me to investigate the progress on our project to find the "most connected of the unconnected" and add that to Special:Unconnected -- something suggested by Greg here. We're actually really close to being able to add this. It just needed a little push. I think we can add the numbers within a few days.

I'm not sure what this will do to how the challenge could be structured, if anything.

Abby, what about Greg as a Project Coordinator for this challenge? Did you ask him yet?

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I haven't asked him-I was waiting to see if another Leader wanted to help, too, but Greeeeeeg.... ;-) You want to help as a coordinator? Your aid would be fantastic and what you do with the numbers crunching on the Sourcerers would be wonderful in the role here. We can just set up a joint spreadsheet on google drive (which is what I have right now for Sourcerers) to keep track of things. Whaddaya think?

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Maybe I could be assistant deputy vice under-coordinator. (Nobody's ever accused me of being coordinated.)

Okay, seriously, I don't want to make promises that I may not be able to keep, but maintaining a spreadsheet doesn't take much time.

Greg

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I was looking at the badges today, and realised that we need a "Winner" Badge for the Connector Challenge. The same trophy design for the existing "Winner" badges should work, and I'd suggest using the same colour scheme as the Connector badge, to tie them together visually.

Greg

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We have a Connection Challenge Winner badge we'll use already associated with the project. I think we're close to set to start the beginning of May.

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Ah. Okay, I didn't see that on the badge list. (I did see the Connection Combat Winner badge, but I'm going on the assumption that the Connection Combat challenges are going to continue on as they are. Personally, I think they're fun to watch, even if I don't have the time to participate.)

Greg

Answer 4

I LOVE the idea of a Connectors Challenge!  We already have the Connectors Combat, which targets two notables.  I like the concept of a connectors challenge that does not limit its focus to notables and does not limit the challenge to two individuals.  Greg did a great job defining this new challenge!  We can keep this going until everyone is connected.  Great idea, Carol, to show the percentage of connected profiles.

I would definitely use regional categories, now that these have been added to the Unconnected People list.  Based on our experience with the Sourcerers Challenge, it appears that many people prefer to work with profiles in areas where they have some experience or special interest.

How soon can we get this new challenge started?

Comments

I think we're aiming for May. I am catching up on email from the weekend, then I have setting up a challenge page on my to-do list.

Answer 5

I've got an idea for a Connectors Challenge. It's associated with Benedict Arnold, the American Revolutionary War traitor. Some years ago, looking into the Avery family of CT, I noticed several men died on the same day. September 6, 1781.

I googled the date, and found that there was something called the Fort Griswold Massacre (aka Battle of Groton Heights.) It was Benedict Arnold, and it was right around where he was raised. He used his local knowledge for advantage for the British redcoats.

So, if those killed all got a category, perhaps the injured too, that page could be linked to Benedict Arnold's page, which I think could use a little more emphasis on the depth of his traitorous betrayal. And being colonial New Englanders, they wouldn't be all so hard to connect. Plus a couple towns - Groton & New London - were largely torched, though tracking down those who were afflicted would likely be a lot more challenging, but something to consider.

So, it might be a fun and interesting challenge. This link has the names of the 88 men who died that day. And we know when and where they all died. Should be enough to get it going. Some of them would probably only need the tag. The Appendix of the book at that link also includes those taken prisoner that day. Pretty much the last of combat in the North for the American Revolution.

Anyhow, that's my idea for a Connectors challenge.