I had talked to Chris about this at one point, and I think we had discussed making sure that those 7000 people weren't already on wikitree. I know in my case, some were, some weren't, so I was going to create a gedcom that only contained those people, so that we weren't left with a whole new slew of merges to execute. Chris, I would imagine, would have to approve it first. Otherwise, manually is the only way, but that does give you a chance to see if that person already exists and link into the tree, eliminating some work.