Wikitree is holding its eighth annual 72-hour sourcing marathon this weekend and you are invited to join genealogists world-wide who are working to improve the research value of Wikitree.
If you are not already familiar with Wikitree, it is a free online family tree website. Unlike sites like Ancestry or MyHeritage, members do not have their own family trees. Instead, they contribute their branches of the tree and try to connect their branches to other existing branches. Members collaborate and work together to expand the tree and build up the family history of each person in the tree. You can read more about Wikitree here.
A family tree without sources is pretty useless. Without source citations, how is anyone able to judge the quality of the information or go take a look at the sources relied upon?
Members of Wikitree (you need an account, but it’s free) sign an Honor Code agreeing to include at least one source citation on the profile of each person in Wikitree, but it does not always happen. So there are a lot of profiles without sources. Volunteers like me work through the year adding sources to such profiles, but once a year there is a big sourcing marathon where contributors can compete for prizes and bragging rights. Last year the Source-a-Thon added sources to almost 64,000 profiles.
With each source added, the quality of the tree improves, and this benefits everyone. I find that Wikitree is a very useful tool in my research and it is also a good way to share information about your family history.
You can find more information about the Source-a-Thon and instructions here. You need to join a team. If you are in Australia, you can join one of the three Australian teams: The Wizards of Aus, Southern Cross Stars and Super Aussie Genies; and the New Zealand team is Kiwi Crew. I am a member of Super Aussie Genies, which is a group of members from the Society of Australian Genealogists. We chat using Discord, so feel free to join us there. There’s also a Facebook group, Wikitree in Australia.
When is it on?
Due to time zone differences, that can be a bit confusing. Kathleen Cobcraft, from the Wizards of Aus team has kindly provided the following:
In Australia, the Source-a-Thon starts at these times on Friday, 29 September:
10pm on the east coast (QLD, NSW, VIC, and TAS)
9:30pm in the centre (SA and NT)
8pm in the west (WA)
and ends on Monday, 2 October (note change to Daylight Savings time!) at:
11pm NSW, ACT, Victoria, Tassie
10:30pm SA
10pm Qld
9:30pm NT
8pm WA
How do we find profiles that need sources?
You can work on the profiles of people on your family lines, starting with yourself and working back in time. If these are already sourced, choose which region you want to work on based on your skills and interests. Wikitree has a page for each region with links to profiles that are unsourced. If you are in an Australian team, you might want to focus on Australian profiles, but here are links to other regions in case you prefer one of them:
New Zealand Â
How do we add source citations?
Wikitree has instructions for adding source citations here but I find the easiest way is to use the Wikitree Browser Extension and Wikitree Sourcer
I hope to see some of you online with us this weekend!
Looking forward to joining you this weekend!