I had a lot of fun with Wikitree this month and even managed three Wikitree achievements!
For the first time ever, I managed to make 1000 contributions to Wikitree in a single month. A contribution is any change or addition to the tree – it is recorded when you save your work. That is a lot of work for one month, which is why it is the first time I have managed it. I achieved this result mainly through my participation on the Australia Project Profile Improvers Team, where I worked through unsourced profiles and added source citations to them.
Wikitree members make a pledge to cite sources on all profiles, but unfortunately many profiles remain unsourced, which means that they have little research value for other researchers. If you are looking for a way to make a valuable contribution to improving Wikitree, you might consider adding source citations to unsourced profiles. You don’t have to aim for 1000 in a month – any contribution is welcome, but if you do manage to make 100 in a month you earn an achievement badge.
Adding sources got me to about 800 contributions for April, and the rest were made during the latest Wikitree Connect-A-Thon event. A Connect-A-Thon is an online event which aims to bring the world closer together by adding missing relatives to existing profiles in Wikitree. Points are earned for every new person added to the tree, provided they are attached to an existing profile. Teams participate from many different countries – this year Australia had three teams, with two new ones lead by the Australia Project leaders, Veronica Williams and Gillian Thomas.
An amazing 76,995 profiles were added to Wikitree during this event. The Australian teams contributed about 12% of those, which is a gallant effort.
My third achievement this month was to boost my CC7 over 1000. The CC7 number indicates how many family connections you have within 7 degrees. Connections are family relationships and degrees are the distance from you. So, the CC7 is a kind of indicator of how well your family history is represented on Wikitree.
Contributing to Wikitree helps your research as well as helping others. Plus, contributing is fun!
If you are not familiar with Wikitree, check out my blog post, Five reasons to use Wikitree.
For more of my articles on documenting your family history, go to the Document page.
