Connectors Monthly - January 2019

Question

Some information for people interested in the Connectors Project:

Connection Status:

As of last month, 3,668,222 out of 18,980,675 profiles (19.33%) on WikiTree were not connected to the main tree. Or, to put it another way, 80.67% of profiles on WikiTree were connected to the main tree. 

Connection Trend:

That percentage is up from 74.30% in March, 2016¹. And, in fact, that percentage has increased at least slightly every single month in all that time, so that's a tribute to the dedication of all connectors.

Whether you have asked for the Connectors badge or not, if you've connected even one unconnected profile to the main tree, you should pat yourself on the back.

Unconnected Branches:

The top ten unconnected branches on the Connectors Chat page this month are:

Number	Linking Profile	Branch Size	Location
1	Geok Kim-1	3,629	China, Malaysia?
2	Loskot-1	2,327	Czech Republic, Slovenia
3	Samaha-3	1,372	Lebanon
4	Evert-56	1,087	Germany
5	Rösel-27	1,068	Austria, Germany, France, USA
6	Kahn-152	895	Hungary, Romania
7	Nascimento-12	852	Portugal, Brazil, Germany
8	Nizamani-3	815	Pakistan
9	Turner-23952	728	USA
10	Nunes Fontes-1	716	Portugal

As you can see, unconnected branches can be from anywhere. The Let others know what locations you are working on page now lists unconnected branches from 35 countries (and 52 states, territories, and the District of Columbia in the United States).

Unlinked Branches:

The good news on this front is that the number of profiles on WikiTree profiles with no links to any other profiles at all has dropped considerably. The last time I checked, approximately 2.5 million out of the approximately 3 million unconnected profiles on WikiTree were actually unlinked. Now, that number is down to 1,004,507 profiles, so clearly, a lot of WikiTreers have done a lot of work to connect or merge a bunch of unlinked profiles, so kudos for all that work. "Connected Profiles" (green) outnumber "Linked but Unconnected Profiles" (light orange), which, in turn, outnumber "Unlinked Profiles".

The bad news isn't just that we still have a little over a million unlinked profiles, but that the short-term trend [December to January] is upward again.

Unlinked profiles happen for a number of reasons:

• Some of them are for people who joined WikiTree and put up their own profiles, but chose not to build out their family trees for whatever reason.
• Some of them are profiles that people have created for Notables, but haven't gone on to add any of those Notables' family members. Many of the profiles in the "Bronze" and "Silver" sections of the Notables List page are in that situation, and need to be connected to the main tree before they can move to the "Gold" section.
• Some of them are leftovers from GEDCOM uploads which somehow got unlinked during the upload process. The Lost and Found Project was started to try to identify, source, link, and finally connect those unlinked profiles.

How to Connect Unconnected Branches:

There are a number of Hints and Tips near the bottom of the Connectors Chat page.

How To Connect To The Connectors Project:

• The first place to look is always the Connectors Project Page 
• You can also check out the Connectors Chat page and its sub-pages. There is content on each page, but also pay attention to the chat running down the right side of each page. Those chats (plus G2G) are our primary ways of communicating within the project.
• If you haven't already used up all your G2G tags, make sure you add the CONNECTORS tag to the tags you follow in G2G, so that any threads with that tag will show up in your G2G Discussion Feed.

Notes:

1. I haven't charted the numbers prior to March 2016, because the method of counting unconnected profiles was changed, so the numbers before and after the change measure different things.

Comments

Update:

Aleš told me how to get the number of unlinked profiles from old reports, so I have been able to build that chart back to June, 2016. 

As you can see, unlinked profiles used to constitute the vast majority of unconnected profiles. The proportion dropped considerably in February 2018, and then dropped again in June.

Unfortunately, within each series (June 2016 to January 2018, February to April 2018, and June 2018 to January 2019), the trend is pretty steadily upwards. If it weren't for the steady increase in Unlinked profiles, we might well have seen more months in which the total number of Unconnected profiles (not just the percentage) went down.

---

This is a terrific update, Greg. Thank you for all the work you do.

---

Thank you for the compliment, Chris. And thank you for all the work you do!

Answer 1

Fantastic update, Greg! Thank you for all the time you put into gathering these stats. I love how they're edging upward.

Comments

Thank you, Abby!

Answer 2

A thread about Jaffa Cakes (which is spun out from a completely unrelated thread which ended up chasing rabbits all over the place) got me thinking that it would be fun to post a list of unconnected people who have invented various goodies, so I posted a reply asking for suggestions. So if you have a particularly beloved goodie, and can identify the inventor, please reply in that thread. (By Friday if you can, because that's when I'm planning to post the list. I'm trying to people a few more days to connect space travellers before laying any more on them.)