 Hey everybody, welcome to our 15th anniversary celebration of wiki tree. We are so excited It's been a good year. I'm excited to be here with my team members. It's not very often that you guys get to see all of us in one place, or most of us at least. And so here we are. We're excited to be here. We're excited to share a little bit about ourselves and what we love about wiki tree. If you're not familiar with wiki tree, I just want to share real quick a little video so that you can understand what we're all about here. So let me do that. Have you researched your family history? Preserve it. Collaborate with your cousins to grow it. Connect it with research from over a million other family history enthusiasts from around the world for free. Welcome to wiki tree, a volunteer based mission driven community dedicated to growing an accurate single family tree. A tree that we all share. Close cousins on wiki tree privately collaborate on profiles of living family members and the recently deceased. Collaboration on deep ancestors is between genealogists who are meticulous about research and cite their sources like historians. Genetic genealogists on wiki tree carefully compare DNA to further increase accuracy. All our efforts come together as one on wiki tree to be preserved and enjoyed by cousins and descendants long after we are gone. Our community is special because we've grown from the grassroots up instead of top down in a big corporation. This has made our community uniquely productive and enjoyable. We're creating something wonderful and having fun at the same time. Come join us at wiki tree.com. So that's a little bit about us and what we do. I think first we'll just kind of start and we'll go around if we can introduce ourselves and just talk a little bit about what we do at wiki tree. Chris, do you have anything you want to say before we jump into questions? No, no, I'm really excited that it's 15 years and that the community chose to celebrate it like this. I think it's been a really great few days so far and hope today is wonderful. That's going to be awesome. Oh, I was going to share just a few milestones from this year before we jump in. So we have over a million members. We just passed 36 million profiles on wiki tree. 31 million of those are now connected to the global tree. And over 12 million of those have DNA test connections. So that's pretty awesome. So I'll just start even though people are probably really tired of seeing me this weekend, but I'm in the forest. I've been in the forest all for 10 years. I do things. I do. I don't even know how to summarize. I do a lot of the community stuff. So I love being involved with wiki trees. You guys are my favorite thing about wiki tree. So the community stuff I do a lot of outreach. I run the challenges. I do a lot and G to G just getting to interact with you guys. I do over a series of social media stuff. Yeah, I do the things. Yup, put together things like this. So that's what I do. More support for the rest of us. More support for the team. For wiki tree. The rest of us in line. So yeah, but that's plenty about me. So how about we go to Paul. Okay. Well, I've been with wiki tree about as long as you want. So it's about 10 years. Just over 10 years. My work's a lot behind the scenes. I mainly handle the UPMs, the unresponsive profile manager requests and the open profile requests. That keeps me pretty busy most of the time. When I find other time, I wander around and look for projects privacy levels like a 200 year old person who's got an unlisted setting that needs to be opened up. There's a few of them scattered around. And generally answer a few questions when people are stuck somewhere. So yeah, that's pretty much my main field. And then other times I on my own, I go out and try and promote wiki tree to talks and libraries and recently did a talk for ABC Radio here in Australia on semi trees, which I'm very active in on wiki tree. So that's probably enough about me. No, that's good. You're definitely one of our behind the scenes heroes for sure. How about a lash. Hi, I'm a lash from Slovenia. So European time usually is good for me on wiki tree. I do mostly technical things. So I did write the connection finder engine that is powering all the relations between profiles. That's part of the main tree and the rest is connected mostly to wiki tree plus where I do many, many things. I wouldn't go into details, but generally the suggestions are part of it. Tracking of the challenges and I maintain the edit bot that is handling categories and templates where they need some major changes. And many other things where some technical advice is needed. You're definitely skills. Yeah, you're definitely in front of the scenes here. Yeah, wiki tree plus is definitely definitely enhanced wiki tree. I think we'd all be at a loss if that went away. How about Jamie. Hi, I'm Jamie. I'm the community technology assistant. I think that's my title. And I answered tech questions on G2G and through email. I keep track of all the bug reports and try to figure out why they're happening and also keep track of improvement requests. I do most of the testing before we release new features. I also lead the wiki tree apps project. So like most of the apps are programmed by other people that are amazing volunteers. And I just kind of try to encourage people to, you know, like, that's how I started out was just kind of coding stuff on my own. And I do some other tech stuff. Just all coding changes and stuff like that. So yeah, that's mostly what I do. Very cool. Yeah, you're like the tech person in G2G for us. I think you answer a lot of the questions there. Yeah. And luckily like a lot of people have sometimes just linked to answers that I've given before, which saves me some or the answer too. So that's cool. Thank you for doing that. All right, Julie. Oh, hello everybody. I'm Julie and I have been on the team for two stints. I think one was about a year and now it's been three years or so. And I might my official title is community assistant. So that kind of makes things a little broad. But primarily I support our functional projects like the rangers, mentors, readers, and when they need team support, they ask me for help and I give them feedback. A lot of the things that I do for the like the mentors is to help them find policy pages that would be helpful when they're trying to help the community. And I answer some of the emails and info ads and I ask a lot of questions with Jamie and sometimes a lash. I send people to Paul. Welcome. So I'm kind of out there a little bit when I'm a little behind the scenes and I'll just pop up every once in a while depending on what's going on. Julie is the unsung hero of the problems with members process. I try we try to try to make that a useful resource that is hopefully not terribly contentious. It's a problem solver. Resolution. Yes. So we do have two team members who couldn't be here today, but we do not want to leave them out. So they answered the questions and I'm just going to share. So first is Abby. She is very rarely on camera. A lot of you probably haven't seen her, but she is another one of our behind the scene heroes. So if you email info, she's most likely the one that you're going to hear back from. So here's what she said about her role at wiki tree. I am the primary person helping to handle requests sent to the team email inbox, though all of us do a little something in there. Much of that time is spent helping with issues people may be having with wiki tree or email closing accounts for deceased family and members. Many administrative tasks such as completing private default services, answering general questions from new members, checking into oddities and errors, and asking for help from our big guns, Jamie and Brian, plus much more. I also plan, gather, improve and curate the weekly connection finder themes and lists. Another part of my role is helping to gather nominations for new leaders, setting them up in their roles and helping them to retire when that time comes. So that is what Abby does. So you probably do see her in G to G for the connection finder stuff. She does that every week. And then Steve, he is also not on camera very often, but another one of our behind the scenes folks. So here's what Steve said about his role. My current title is special projects coordinator, but that may be a leftover from when I first joined the team and only scratches the surface of what my role encompasses. As the project manager, I help to coordinate projects and provide tech support for administrative tasks. This includes setting up project accounts, Google groups and discord channels, and assisting in monitoring project suggestions. I also offer support to projects when additional permissions are required, such as clearing suggestions on pre-1500 or private profiles, creating or modifying templates and granting badge permissions to project coordinators. I also work on tasks which are not nearly as visible to most members, such as data analysis, monitoring SEO, and identifying potential improvements. I also work with Chris on ad publishing efforts, which is essential in sustaining wiki tree as a free and accessible resource. So there's a little bit about each of us. Chris, to answer that one, I'm going to keep going. Yeah. So I'm the president and founder of wiki tree. So I do things. He does things too. I do what nobody else does. I do the administration and income and expenses and management. And I guess like just big picture making sure that everything stays focused on the mission and that the community has what they need to do it. Our wiki tree in chief, that's what we call him. So how did you find wiki tree? What started Juliana? You know, I don't really remember a hundred percent. It was back in 2011. So I was one of the first people here, I guess, close to it. It was still very small. There wasn't anybody here. And I had received a large book from my parents that my mother had given to my dad that chronicled the history of his family. And I was really interested in it and started digging around finding places where I could do genealogy, which I really didn't know what that meant at that point. And I found wiki tree because it was free. So I thought that was great because back then there was nothing that was free in regards to genealogy. So I dove in and didn't really find very many people to talk to. So I came back a couple years later. And there were a lot more people here. And there was a lot of talk going on in T2G. And I just kind of started reading everything out there and kind of started getting the gist. And some of our original members were very kind and steered me in the right direction and gently suggested that I should maybe add some sources to things that I was putting on my profiles. And that was it. Cool. How about you, Jamie? Yeah, I don't. I don't remember exactly how I found it. So I signed up for my account in 2012, but I don't remember doing that. I was on WeRelate for a long time. And then I switched over to FamilySearch's Tree when that launched. And that was kind of frustrated by some of the things there. So then I was like, oh, I'd like, let's replace it for FamilySearch and the found wiki tree. And then I was like, oh, I already have an account. So that was about the end of 2015 that I found it again. And then I think it was the connection finder or like the connections to me thing that got me sucked in. So I started trying to add connections to famous people to the tree. And yeah, I got addicted. Alash, how about you? Well, I also was searching for a free solution to put my tree on the Internet. And wiki tree was the one I found with all others that were kind of free. There were some limitations and here there are actually none. So that was initially what got me into it. I wasn't really interested in the single tree aspect of it because I didn't really connect to existing profiles for a long time. But now it's interesting to see. That's interesting aspect also to see how you're connected to Queen Elizabeth and other notables. Paul, you're here almost pretty close to the beginning, right? Well, 10 years or so. That's a little bit afterwards. I can still remember when I found it. Actually, I'd been on Genie for a while and they went commercial. So I didn't like that. So I looked around and there was wiki tree waiting. And I had quite a substantial tree at that time. I think I think it will limit some dead coms at that stage. And I think I uploaded something like 25,000 people. And then Chris, I got to talk to Chris a lot and then the other side of the world, it was quite interesting because I remember when he was doing a bit of updating and things that I'd spotted in what would be the middle of the night with him, I could fix it before it really became a problem. So we got talking a bit and got to know each other over those years. And it became, well, it's invaluable to me. I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather have my tree. I do that collaborative aspect of it. Not everybody sort of understands that, but the huge majority do. And if you can work together with somebody, it's only to your own benefit to do that. So, yeah, I can't see myself ever finding anywhere else as good as wiki tree. And probably the oldest one here, so I've been putting trees on here since the browsers were text browsers. I think I used the links browser when I put my first tree up somewhere. So I found wiki tree. I want to say it was like April of 2012. It was back when you had to be invited. So I remember my account was set up by Tammy, who used to be a team member a while ago. And so I got the email from her that said, you know, hey, your account's ready. So I was like, sweet. And I signed in and I had no idea what to do. I kind of looked around and I just, you know, I wasn't super familiar with wikis. And so I just didn't really do much. And then a year later, for some reason, I must have popped up somewhere and I was like, oh yeah, I had an account there. And I came back and there is a little bit more community stuff going on. And so I was really excited. I kind of like jumped in wherever I could find stuff to do. Yes, I'm one of those annoying people who likes to be at the top of the contributions list. So I was doing a lot of contributing because the same guy had been at the top of the list for months and I was really determined to be him. And I did for that one month. But I probably annoyed a lot of members because I was doing mergers and I had no idea what I was doing. And sorry, people from 2013. So, but yeah, I mean, obviously I've been hooked ever since wiki tree is kind of my home away from home. I'm on it that much. Abby answered this one. So Abby has been here since 2011. She said, I had worked on hosting my own family history site, but found that I really wanted to be able to work with the cousins who shared ancestry. I did some web searching and found genie and wiki tree. I dug in a little and decided I liked the wiki tree approach to things and uploaded a GEDCOM that day. I've been here ever since. And Chris, you founded wiki tree. So we won't ask how you found wiki tree. So members wanted to know what is your genealogy story? So like how did you get into genealogy? So, Alash, I would like to know from you. Well, here genealogy is not so popular as in other places in the world because you just go to the local cemetery and you see most of your ancestors there. So it wasn't really something that I was searching for my roots. And even now all the roots are still from Slovenia. So we didn't migrate much. But I was interested in ancestors. I mean, you know, grandparents and great-grandparents and further on it gets lost. But now I was able to find many sources up to 1700. So I extended my family quite a bit. Cool. So if I remember right, we finally got you connected and then was it during the wiki games that you got disconnected? Yeah, I disconnected myself. It was a wrong link. I mean, I found the proof that there were two persons with the same names that migrated to America and that wasn't my relative. Well, we got you reconnected pretty quickly. Yeah, a day later. On another branch. Jamie, how about you? So I was kind of exposed to genealogy from a young age just because I grew up LDS. And so that's kind of big in the church. But I wasn't super interested because it was a church activity. And so like, so like I knew what genealogy and family history was, but I didn't get interested in it until like my, until I got into like my early 20s. And then my, my dad had a photo album. And he was like, so my dad's side wasn't LDS. And then he was like, Hey, you're good at computers. Like, I know this picture is of a pastor and he's my ancestor, like figure out who he is. And so I was like, okay, I could probably, I could probably figure this out. And yes, I signed up for an ancestry trial and got, got sucked in. Once I figured out who this guy was, it was like, Oh, this is like solving a puzzle. And yeah, yeah. There's a lot of genealogy. Very cool. So Steve answered this one. So let me go ahead and share Steve. He said, my origin story mirrors that of many others. It began with a strong desire to uncover more about my family's roots and connect with the stories of my ancestors. In 2011, while visiting the grave of our recently deceased family matriarch, I had a profound realization. I found myself not just surrounded by headstones, but by the resting places of many of my ancestors. This sparked my curiosity. After some initial research, I swiftly discovered that I had familial connections to a significant number of individuals interred in that cemetery. Among those grave sites was my third great-grandfather, a figure I had struggled to chase in one of my genealogical brick walls. Around 2012, I stumbled upon wiki tree when it was an invitation-only state and began exploring the platform and its capabilities. This marked the beginning of my journey, which turned into a deep involvement in the genealogy community. Over time, I evolved from a curious newcomer to a project coordinator, then a project leader, and now a dedicated wiki tree member. So that's Steve. How about you, Paul? Oh, me, yes. Well, I go back to well before the internet with my research. Asking parents, while I'm being in Australia, of course, my mother's side, I can go right back to the convicts. My father's Danish, though, so that was a different thing. And I asked my parents and grandparents that I got great little information, and researching them was going to libraries and poring through microfilms. It wasn't really until the internet came around that I finally discovered we had convict ancestors. I got, I think, five convicts there, one coming on the very first sleep to Australia. Also, I asked my Danish relatives, could they give me some information? They said, yes, yes, yes, but that never was forthcoming. So eventually I discovered at the point that the Danish church records went all online, and you can go on there and look through all the church records, even though they're not itemized in any way. You have to actually search through the actual pages. It's still helped me find people back as far as 1600, because they were very well documented back there. So I finally managed to get my trees together and grow them, and then the DNA came along and helped to close a few of the deadlines. So it became, it was quite a journey, yeah. Sounds like it. Abby answered that one too, so she said, I always love family history, but dug in deep when a college short-term course was offered in genealogy. My childhood best friend and I took the course together and enjoyed the research with her, tooling around to various cemeteries and history libraries, as well as finding out how we are related. I never stopped that research, and I even talked her into joining WikiTree all these years later, though she isn't nearly as active as I am. Julie? First let me apologize if my dogs get noisy. It's normal walking time here, so they have to wait. Well, I mentioned the book that my mom got for my dad. I had it here. Anybody familiar with this kind of thing? Got all my newspaper clippings and stuff in it. And it's like 400 years with my dad's family. But when I dove into that and got very interested in, like Jamie said, the puzzle aspect of it, I started learning more also about my mom's side and learned that my grandmother was an adopted twin. So then we started digging around in that history and asking questions and discovered that her twin was adopted by a different family. And then that just led to more curiosity about, well, who was her mom and who was her dad? And it turned up a very interesting story in Sweden about her mother was a 40-year-old single woman working for a wealthy family. And the father of the twins was the husband in that wealthy family. So since then, I've done a DNA test and started connecting with some Swedish cousins very loosely. I've talked to a few people on the other side of the world. And that whole aspect of our family was very interesting to me and I wanted to learn more about Swedish culture, which we still had quite a bit of that in my family. We keep up some Swedish traditions around the holidays and that, but it was just interesting to me how that story came about. I still wish I could have learned more about their early lives, but everybody that was living at that time is gone. So I can't ask them questions anymore. But that was the whole puzzle aspect presented by my dad's side and then the mystery aspect from my mom's side is really what kept me going. Very cool. Tris, I know you were kind of the family historian for your family. That's sort of where Wikitrus started. What's roots, right? But were you into it before that, before people started giving you stuff? Yeah, so I mean, I was really interested in family history, just like the heirlooms and the objects and the stories from my grandparents. And that's been lifelong. I mean, I collected things from all over. When I was in high school, my great aunt, my grandmother's sister sat with me and actually did a family tree. So a lot of that came from there. And then it was the time of my wedding in 2005 that I wanted to put together a lot of the things I had, like that family tree that I had on paper and all these objects and connections and then also my wife's family. And so that was really the origin of Wikitree, was when I put it together on a website, that was like a little nugget that would eventually become Wikitree. Because I wanted people at the wedding to be able to say, oh, you're missing this. This is this. Point out things and add things. And so that idea of enabling people to add and contribute to it started in 2005. Very cool. So what do you like to do on Wikitree when you're not doing your team roles on Wikitree? Paul. I have a busman's holiday. I go out and cover cemeteries. That's my biggest interest. I think I photographed well over 50,000 gravestones now and with a couple of other Wikitrees, one who's actually a distant cousin. We're in Australia. We've probably added 250,000, 300,000 profiles connected to those and connected them to the tree. So I loved a little bit on the... I don't know who's responsible for that in the Wikitree team. On the symmetric category pages, where you click a button to find out who you're related to or who you're connected to. That's quite fabulous. A number of people I find in pretty much every symmetry I cover that I have a connection to. Yeah. That's my main interest and photography in general. I've seen it. That's it. Cool. Jamie, how about you? This year, I've been trying to focus or get my focus back to my own family history, because I've kind of let it slide over, working on other interests. But I also am super interested in Latter-day Saint family history and that kind of stuff. That's fun. Then I also had four brick walls in the same town in Illinois. So I've been doing a one-place study on that to try to figure out who they are. So I added everyone from the census from 1860 to 1900. It was about 3,000 people. So I've been researching all of them. And I did break down one of the brick walls. Nice stuff. Yeah. Doing one-place studies can help with that. So yeah, that's what I do for fun. Very cool. So Abby said, I don't find it very often, but when I do have the time, I always love adding random new finds. Lately, I've been trying to out my CC7 number. I know there's a lot of lateral family I haven't added yet. I also have a project working on the local history of the area I live in, and I have several trees for friends I work on, a couple of whom are adoptees I was able to use DNA to find parents for. Adding to their trees is especially fun. Oh, and rabbit holes. So many rabbit holes. They're especially bad after thorns. For example, working on the recent source of fun, I would add a source to see that the tree wasn't attached, but there was a bunch of information available. So I'd put it aside to come back to later and add to. It's so satisfying to connect unconnected branches, which I guess is why I work with the connectors project more than any other. So how about you, Alash? Well, I don't really have much free time for neurology. So I take advantage of thorns and during the thorns, I usually research my research, the church books that became now available online for Slovenia and add sources to my relatives and add also new ones that I find. So that's a genealogical part. Otherwise, occasionally I do some, I do correct some suggestions that are in the reports that I create and so, and I don't know, many other things that are very technical. Nice. How about you, Julie? Well, I rarely work on my own family, Jamie, but I do tend to fall down rabbit holes. I'm surprised I haven't run into Abby down there, but a lot of people are familiar with the Friday date night. It's kind of a challenge. We kind of loosely call it a challenge, but it's more of an effort to find all of the profiles on Wiki Tree that don't have any dates. And so that's kind of become a favorite activity of mine is to go out and work on those and then there's a group of us and anybody's welcome. We do this about every other Friday night or Friday afternoon or whatever time it is in your time zone. We get together for about an hour on Zoom and we talk about what we've been working on and sometimes it wavers off into non-topic, off-topic things and we just have a nice little community of people that are working on this kind of stuff and then they park things in a category for me and I get to go out and dive into that every now and then see if I can find people who... This is morbid, but they'll put people in there as they presume we're still living and so we put them on enlisted. And then before I take action with those, I try to find somebody to manage them but sometimes that can't happen and so we have to delete the profiles but before we do that, I go out and see if I can find an obituary for them. I don't really like doing that part, so I don't like celebrating when I find an obituary. Let me put it that way. But it is nice to be able to take the profile and keep it so that we still have that information on WikiTree but cleaning that up is just one of my favorite things and you'd be amazed at what you can find from just a profile that has first and last name and connections to some relatives. It's amazing how much information you can find out there to get them flushed out with sources and the right dates and places and get them connected to the tree. So that's one of my favorite things to work on. Very cool. I don't have a lot of time but what I do love is the random profile feature that's part of the WikiTree browser extension and you can just leave it as it is and it will just give you a random profile from anywhere on WikiTree but you can also set it so that it's just your watch list. So I try every day to hit a few random profiles that are in my watch list and I've been trying to... I've... I inherit a lot of profiles from people who have passed away and so I've been trying to go through and kind of open up the ones I can from there and clear them off my watch list and once I get my watch list down I hope I want to spend more time fixing this and working on my direct lines especially my biological family because there's... I have a lot to add still on that side so... and bonus. So Ian was super awesome. Ian Bacall I asked if we could have a random free space page option and so he added that. So now there's so many free space pages and I know there's great ones out there that are just hidden because there's so many of them I try to click through a few of the random free space pages now every day just to see what people are doing see if what's out there find some good ones to share so that's probably what I mostly do what I'm not doing actual wiki tree team stuff. So... Chris do you ever get to do... I know you pop up during the thongs marathon and do some of your stuff is that the main time for you? Yeah, like Olesh said I take advantage of the marathon events like that as an opportunity then that I just participate and so I love that I love the connectathons especially like that like for a while I was just doing Wittons where I do pick a location in New England town or something and connect there but lately since the CC7s I've been like choosing like an aunt the uncle that marries in or the cousin that marries in and then do their tree and so yeah I really love that I love connecting Very cool Yeah I think next year my goal would be to bump up my CC7 number because I think this year it's bumped up like nine so I've got to work on that I'm jealous of those people who have 30,000 so I've got to catch up I've got a lot but it's been sliding down because I have more active people than me So what is your favorite or one of your favorite features of WikiTree? Let's start with Jamie So I kind of already mentioned this when I said like how I got into WikiTree I really like the connection finder and the relationship finder it's great like being able to see how you're connected to a person you're working on and then I guess a secondary it's not really a feature but the API being able to you know program something that you want to see using the data is pretty cool How about you Lush? WikiTree Plus right? I just wanted to say that right Well I really can select something that's my favorite but WikiTree Plus is a thing to I mean all the features and that are available there and I try to invent new ones that will be useful for users lately also WikiTree browser extension is I kind of like to work on it although I don't a lot but when I do it's really cool to add new features that can improve user experience for other members I like it Paul how about you? Oh wait I think I might need to the main interest one was the symmetry category page button to find connections but also I like the symmetry map that Steve put together that's quite a wonderful one to have a look at too I quite often browse that to see what I'll go next what hasn't been done and what needs doing yeah that's probably my main feature and of course I like free space pages I think they're wonderful too definitely Julie how about you? I like everybody else I don't think I can pick a favorite I do love the collection of features that have been added by the browser extension I love categories of course the connection finder and a really nice feature of WikiTree is our community and how great they are working together and teaching other people how to be a good genie out just so I love that a lot cool so Abby said gosh that's a question lately I've been using all the WikiTree extension tools it's simple but the clipboard is always in use lately I also love using free space pages there's so much depth of family history and tradition and being able to work up pages about places items groups of people and stories and link them to the profiles of the ancestors is so handy I have several pages for family recipes for example when I have time or fun to add to I have stacks of recipes from grandparents aunts and uncles so I pick one cook it up, photograph it and type it up and put it on the space page for that ancestor and then Steve said my favorite feature on WikiTree without a doubt is the platform's collaborative nature while it may sound broad this aspect is fundamental to WikiTree's identity even though it may be hard at times considering the global inclusivity we strive for by fostering a strong sense of community and encouraging members to work together it is given rise to a wealth of unique resources and tools that set WikiTree apart from many other genealogy websites one such example is the apps project where members can actively contribute to items like tree apps and the collective efforts result in valuable tools that benefit the entire WikiTree community the sense of collaboration and shared contribution is what makes WikiTree such a special place for genealogists Chris do you have a favorite feature for two? Like Paula was saying about my connections on the categories a lot of what Alesha's code has enabled I think has really been like transformational for WikiTree most recently like I love the CC7 like I think that was like it just like sort of epitomizes what WikiTree is and encapsulates it in a nice little package so a lot of credit to Alesha because without his ultra-efficient code really a lot of these things would not be possible very true good job Alesha we're glad you're here yeah I think you guys have already said a lot of mind well like I said the random profile feature is probably one of my favorite the my connections with the categories I really enjoy that um it's not really a feature but I love the community events I love the challenges like the we will rock you you know I love the generosity of the WikiTree from this community they're so excited to help with anything really and it's just fun I love the spirit and just I love how excited WikiTrees get about everything it's so fun so that's kind of what I love so let's see what are you looking at going forward Alesha like maybe for the coming year do you have any goals or any thing you're aiming for nothing we'll see what Alesha's taking the year off I usually don't do projects that last for years I mean the idea counts I implement it and that's it that is quite true about you Jamie how about for the apps project um what do you think I guess we'll find out on the October Fest wrap up huh well that would be like stuff that we did this past year I was planning on getting better documentation up to help people like newer people to contribute to and I did not get that done last month so hopefully that's what I'll work on in the future for the apps project and just like trying to get you know there's like a lot of people that like genealogy and also are programmers like I found a lot more people in this hobby that are programmers so just convincing people to like hey like do you have like getting ideas from people like hey do you have an idea for a tool or and like connecting those people with the people that want to program something but don't have an idea cool yeah I feel like we've just had this explosion of apps and especially with the wiki tree browser and I feel like new stuff is added there faster than I can even keep up with yeah it's hard for me to keep up so that's been pretty awesome Julie anything in your arena that you're looking forward to for the next year more mentors right more rangers this is your chance to recruit I think she's frozen all right well never mind Chris how about you what would you like to see for the next year I just decided to put Oscar on camera here since he is orange I like it so I'm sorry what was the question can you repeat it we're just talking about the next year like do you have any goals you'd like to see happen yeah I mean like the others have said I think what's going on in the apps project is really important and I think a lot of people don't even appreciate how fundamentally important it is to the future of wiki tree you know we are keeping this organization like what is the wiki tree team here is intentionally very small and that's the way it's meant to be so that it's about the community so that it really is a community website and community members have a lot of say over the direction it takes and what the right choices to be made are made and so what's going on with the apps project and Jamie has been doing a great job coordinating on this making sure wiki tree is like a solid foundation and so we're making some changes right now doing some infrastructure things that will even move us further in that direction we've got some design changes we have to upgrade a little bit update the site just a little bit but we're going to try to make those really conservative so they're not disruptive and again just like move wiki tree more towards being just like a solid foundation on which the community builds nice I like it you're 16 it's going to be a good one I'm fat are you fat? I don't know what happened I can hear you it was very frustrating wait go ahead end of year or not end of year but in the future you hit it right on the nail on the head Alen I'd really like to see more people get involved with our mentoring project we have a really robust team of people out there that are working very hard to educate members who maybe came in and didn't realize what they signed up for or new to genealogy and just need to learn how to find and add sources to the information they provide the whole problems with members process is a problem resolution process it's unique to wiki tree I don't think you'll find anything like it anywhere else and I would love to see more people get involved on the mentoring and that can help other wiki tree members be successful very good well do any of you have anything you want to add before I kind of wrap this up yeah I'll add a bit I just want to thank the community the communities what it's all about and those watching here and those who aren't watching without the active ones of those look they do most of the work for us in many ways answering questions I always refer people to them I usually follow up and see what they help they get and I'm just amazed at the accuracy and depth of the average wiki tree answers so thank you to all of you who are watching and those who can't hear me I still give thanks to you nope excellent point good note to end on totally agree so I just wanted to share this screen really quick here we have a lot of stuff going on today so I want to make sure you know about it you can see there's kind of three streams going today when we have the main stage there's a lot of different stuff happening there today we have some games there's if you're a brand new member I suggest that you check out the new member CUNY with Betsy you will definitely learn a lot about how to get started there Julie and Azure and I are doing the ABCs of wiki tree so you might learn about some things on wiki tree that you didn't know about before at 115 please come and celebrate with us we're doing our 15th anniversary toast so be here and you can join in with us at 2 Eastern which I think is 7 UTC we're having a genealogy and artificial intelligence panel we've got six guests that are coming to talk that should be really interesting if you're at all into the artificial intelligence after that we're doing the cookbook reveal so Azure and Betsy are going to share some of the neat stuff that's in there Greg Clark is going to do a talk about genealogy and mathematics if you've been around for our 15 nations global tour this year every three weeks we hit a different country and really focused on trying to amp up their presence on wiki tree so David is going to do a wrap up of that and then at 8pm Eastern 1am UTC Greg Clark we all know he loves the statistics so he's going to share some wiki tree stats and then we'll wrap up wiki tree day but there's also this project stream many of our projects have put together some really great presentations about their project so if you've ever been interested in learning about any of those please tune in to watch them and then if you're into the apps and extensions this third stream there's a lot of different presentations on different apps and on the wiki tree browser extension there is a wrap up of Hacktoberfest all kinds of good stuff going on today a little bit of everything something for everybody so yeah and these these videos will be up forever so if you don't feel pressure, if you can't watch it today you can always watch it later so they'll still be up on our YouTube channel so I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew what was going on today and otherwise I just say happy wiki tree day happy anniversary thanks everybody