 Hey everybody! It's me, Ewan, Forestel. I know it's been a while since you guys have seen me, but here I am and I'm very excited to be here so that I could introduce fellow wikitri here, Marty Axe. He's going to share about his wikitri experience with you. Let me tell you just a little bit about him. Marty has been researching his family history since 1999 after having caught the bug from his mom and dad. Marty joined wikitri in 2014 and recently joined the 100,000 Contributions Club. His areas of focus on wikitri include surname studies, data doctoring, Scotland, and pre-1500 work. Past wikitri volunteer efforts have included rangering and volunteering at the wikitri roots tech booth, which is where we got to meet. He is a board member of the Downers Grove Historical Society and past board member of the Computer Assisted Genealogy Group of Northern Illinois. So we're excited to have you here and I will let you go ahead and do your thing. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, everybody, today. So let me just make sure we got the technical side of this down. Can people see my slide for an introduction to my PowerPoint slide? Are you sharing your screen? I'm trying to, but in StreamYard, let me just... Oops. Let me just do that one more time. How's this? Yep, there it is. Okay, great. So want to thank everybody for attending. I think this is the end of the final stages of wikitri days and in our three to four day event. So I hope to provide a different perspective into wikitri. I've been using wikitri for about just checking nine years now. So I have... I'll give a little background on my journey, perhaps. So if you sat in on the last session with Chris and some of the other team members, they kind of went through some of that similar introduction, if you will. So I've been interested in genealogy. Most of my life, I suppose, because I am adopted and people are curious about that, I suppose. I've got it serious about it. It started about 1999 when my folks, both my mom and dad, sort of just gave me their research. They've done build out trees, largely not using the internet or just emailing people and getting stuff in the mail. So my interests include Scotland. I also am very interested in surname studies with... My birth name is Lenovo. So I'm one of those rare people, sort of like Chris, with... I've got the Lenovo dash one. I'm a dash one, or if you will. So came late, but there's just not that many Lenovo's. Porterfield, Malacote, and Axe is my adopted name. So a little background for me is I'm involved with... I'm in the Chicago area. So I was on board for about five years of that, of Cagney, which is a Chicago area genealogy group. Started off as a Stanford computerated genealogy group of Northern Illinois, but kind of spans about five or six counties in Chicago. And I'm also a board member at the Downish Grove Historical Society. I'll talk a little bit about that later. I use wiki tree for some of the things we do for our town founders and the like, and pioneers from... They came to our village. I used to be in the software industry, co-founded somebody called Solon Software in case you want to Google it. It's still around. And like any good... There's sort of levels of commitment to genealogy, and we got to the point where my wife graciously incorporated genealogy into our family vacations, because I'm one of those kind of nuts where if you go east, I can find ancestors. And the east and south a little bit, not too far south. I can find something of research. On the other side, she's actually a first generation Belgian. So not a lot for her to research. So she's been instrumental in some of my research journey, so doing some of the heavy lifting. So one of the things I do when I do various talks both here and when I was in the real and the working world, if you will, is I like to have a couple of objectives for talks. So what I want to get at, what I'd like people to come out of this talk with, and I usually do this type of talk to people that are probably less familiar with wiki tree, sometimes new. So I'm assuming this group, you know, given its wiki tree days that we probably have a little more people experience with wiki tree, but if not, hopefully we got a few that are just found it came across us. Like you got a basic understanding, get a roadmap of how to get started. It's a little bit, there's a little bit of a hump to get over in terms of just making sure you're a real human being, not a big one. And also an overview of some of what I consider some of those compelling features. And if you sat in on some of the other sessions, even like the session, for example, that they caught kickoff this morning. And as they went around with the panelists, everybody has a different view of what, how they use wiki tree. So, so that rather than tell you all the possible things you might do in wiki tree, I'm going to, you're going to get sort of a flavor of what I found fascinating. And you may not, you may find some of those things fascinating. You might find things that I don't do like, you know, some social stuff like the discord server for wiki tree. I still am afraid with discord. Sorry about that guys that are into it. So there's parts that I don't use real heavily that are perfectly great for other folks. So what I want to start off with is just a definition of a wiki. That is the source of some confusion sometimes. Some people ask like, what's the difference between wiki tree and wikipedia, for example? And what is just a wiki in general? So wiki, the term wiki started to come about probably as a function of probably before wikipedia, but wikipedia is probably the best known wiki. And from my perspective, these are sites that basically they have lots of individual articles, but they're very interlinked. So for folks that are like my age in their 60s, you might remember everybody family habit encyclopedia on their, you know, set of encyclopedias. I had the Compton encyclopedias with that 24 of them. So you had to read about something it's like, Oh, that's interesting. I want to follow up on that. So you go to the, you go to the bookshelf, drag another book down, open that, you know, flip to that page in the book and then you flip to something else. In the case you use the index, and you might have four or five books sitting on your desk by a large table there that fit on the desk, to, if you wanted to use, if you wanted to do research that was, you know, jumping around. So the thing I like about wikis is you can just click and go from instead of bringing all those books on your desk, you can just go click, click, click, click. And, you know, sometimes you get down a rattle and other times you can find out a lot more about that topic that you're interested in, in a very quick, quick, in very short order, if you will. So wikipedia is probably the best known wiki. And it is a broad based wiki. It's a little different than wiki tree that has articles on all sorts of things, including people that on wikipedia, you do have, there is a requirement so that it just doesn't have a billion pages, I suppose, of what's called notability. So I'll give an example, my brother used to play professional football. That's a notability. So he's, he's out on wiki, he's out on wikipedia. I'm just a geologist, started a small company, what, for the things I've done in my life, I haven't met, I haven't met their criteria for, for, for notability. So I will never be on, well, let's hope. Well, you know, I'll probably never be on wikipedia, would you be on my guess. The, so one of the things I, with wiki, so I would, so it's a big, so some people say, why don't we just do this all on wikipedia? And the reality is that you couldn't, most of what we put in wiki tree couldn't, wouldn't qualify as content for wikipedia. So wikis usually have a high level of linking between all the content I mentioned. Some examples of wikis are a lot of, yeah, I guess I picked some that I find interesting, kind of some, some Star Trek, Mission Impossible, you know, those are, those are things I find interesting. I occasionally use those, not that much. A lot of TV shows and movies will have them, and they'll break down all the characters and things like that. So, shows like Mash and the like. And the one, the final thing I might say about wikis is there is one that's often a source of confusion is family search has a really cool wiki, but it's really a resource, it's really for resources, it doesn't have people in it. Family search has their area with people in it, but it's not wiki based. The, I find the research wiki to be really useful, mainly for, from geographic point of view. So if I go to a county, I want to know what all the resources are. They have a really nice, well organized structure for finding sources for certain geographies. But it's not, they're, they're on a, it's a wonderful wiki, but it's, they're solving a different problem than we are with the, with wiki tree. So what is wiki tree? I'll give you the, the standard, the standard tagline we've got right now. It's the mission, mission to grow a accurate single family tree that connects us all and it's freely available to everyone. The free is a big aspect of this, as you might have heard in previous sessions. Free is, it's good. It's not the end all for me. I would, you know, I would probably pay for some of the content, but it's nice that I don't have to. You can, there's different ways to engage with wiki tree. You don't have to join. You can, you can just go in and find relatives and look at them. So we like those people because they actually help pay the bills. If you're not registered, you will see, you will see some ads. So every time one of those ads pops up, little, little tip goes in the wiki tree tip jar to help pay some of the salaries of the team and keep the, keep the lights on a wiki tree. But you can also join and, and I think to join, there's no cost and you can add to the tree and collaborate with others. And we talk, historically, when I first started doing talks about wiki tree, I didn't talk mainly about the tree. I've kind of pivoted now that it's a lot of it about collaboration just on your, on not just on relatives, but also collaborating on different geographies. So if you're interested in a certain area in Scotland, there's some, which I am, there's some phenomenal resources out there that people live in Scotland. They've, I was talking, and I have one case where I, somebody was had sources I'd never seen and I reached out to the, to the person. He goes, yeah, I've got a 10,000 book library years. of Scottish history. I'm like, well, that's why I would see these things because everything's not online. One thing I like is wiki tree is privacy is a big concern in the world. So modern, so modern history is kept private. And there's a sort of a great, there's a scale of about different levels of privacy. It's not simply a binary type of approach. The other things start happening in the last few years, there's this concept called apps within wiki tree that allow people to build on top of the core technology. And that has added a huge amount of value to wiki tree. And I'll talk a little about that later. So the gist of this is it's, you know, when I started on this, it's, it's cool. I've got an, I can, you know, I can collaborate with people on third and fourth and fifth cousins and great, great, great grandparents. That was what I really saw the value in wiki tree. But as I've started to use it more and more over the years, it's, the tree is great. And it's, it's quarter and fundamental to what we do here. But it is a, it's just the starting point. So I took this picture, this picture, so I think from a little bit, a little bit older. It includes many of the people you might have seen on yesterday's session with Chris in the middle. I think that was from wiki, that was from roots tech about four or five years ago. I got a little more engaged with wiki tree back then I showed up. I ended up not doing a lot of roots, ended up hanging around the wiki tree booth and they gave me a shirt and so became a big fan and helped help people out at the booth for the last couple of days there. But I'm not in that picture. So a little bit about the numbers on wiki tree is founded by Chris Whitten. I think Chris is monitoring the feed here. So thank you very much, Chris, if you're still around. He started it in 2008. Just a few numbers here. They've had really exponential growth and the site after 15 years is still growing. So back and I did some snapshots a while back. As of 2019, there were there were 21 million profiles and I'll just jump to four years later. So we're up to 35.7 million profiles in over a million members. Now I'll all of those million members, they're not in every day like some of us working on our trees, but they've at least made some minor, they've usually made some contributions. So the ones that are really doing the majority of the work is really more of about a quarter million of people that have signed the honor code and have made have made more significant contributions. So getting started in wiki tree, it's like a lot of websites, but there's a there's one step that you go through. You put a little bit of information about yourself. We're trying to keep the bots out and and people like that. You wait for an email may take a few hours. I haven't done this for a while. So I don't know what the experience is today. But there's real people behind the scenes and they'll ask you. And these are people called rangers. They'll ask you or greeters ask you why you're interested and just try to get a human response. And then you're encouraged to sign the honor code. And when I first started, when I try to avoid when doing presentations, having lots of text on the screen, but this this is the one place where I kind of violate that, you know, that guideline because the honor code is really number one, it's core to our beliefs and number one, it's core to what the site does and it gives you a lot of insights into that. So and if you look at the code and say that's if some of the stuff you have issues with, then you're probably on the me, honestly, you're probably on the wrong website. But in terms of the code, and some of these, there's nine components of the code and some of them sort of overlapping what they're trying to accomplish. But a number one, it's a collaboration site. You do not I've had people that, you know, they put a they connect with a third or fourth grandparent and they want their own version of the grandparent. And if you like to be private, you and you don't really want to contribute at that level, then you know, there's you can use your genealogy program to use ancestry. It's, you know, I think you miss a lot of value by not collaborating with others. But it's, but that's core to our core to what we do. Accuracy is really important. So sourcing, we over time, we become more adamant about sourcing. On the other hand, there's a lot of different ways to source. So there's not as much as, you know, some of the goals might be to have a certain formatting style, you know, there's no brow beating over, you know, you didn't exactly put a comma here or a period there. The goal with sourcing is, can I can I look at that source information? And if I didn't enter that information, can I go is it is, is there enough information there that I can go determine what what that source is? We also there's a very kind, warm, fuzzy feeling about this site compared to others. You, you do have to, we do assume that mistakes are unintentional. There's and they encourage people to be bold. There is ability to be any change that you make on profiles, you can roll it back if you made a mistake. So so three and four sort of related is just be nice to people. And as you follow the forums, there's a forum called G to G. The forum is, you know, if you've been on other forums on the internet, it is it is one of the nicest forums. And, you know, if people have issues with folks, there's a process to, there's a remediation process, and we ask you to keep it out of the forums. And you start off with like, you start off with, you know, Curtis response. So we tend to have very, I won't say it happened, but it's very rare that people get kicked off the site. You have to, you know, it's people do monitor. We do monitor for that and encourage, and we have a process we go through that to encourage be courteous, but it is a very respectful site. So it has been my experience. Privacy is a big deal. I've got a slide on privacy. I'll talk about that later. So copyrights are an issue. So don't take your, you know, but don't take everything on a fine grade page or a modern book and just cut and paste it. Information is not copyrighted, but the way it's presented is copyrighted in broad terms. Give credit where credit to also. So there's, there's a place where we do that called acknowledgements on where people have made major, major contributions on profiles. And we also have a lot of social aspects where you can give awards to people that have been extremely helpful. And those appear on in some of the newsletters that go out, the emails that go out, and that appear on the genealogy genealogist genealogist forum. So we refer to as GDG. So again, free, keeping it free is one of the core aspects. So so anyway, that's a little about the honor code. I think that's really core to what we do here. So so I'm just going back to turn to remember when I started wiki tree. So I you what you do is you create a profile, you enter some parents and grandparents. I am you can import family via GEDCOM. There are some restrictions in that. So you can't go back too far, I think, before 1700, with the idea that you're going to probably create lots of duplicates. But I will. So so I give some GEDCOM and and I like I like well written profiles. And the GEDCOMs, no matter what you do, they don't really show up as well written. So so I tend to I've used to the GEDCOM once and I just manually entered in now. But if you want to use GEDCOMs, there is a there's a better process for doing them when I joined. So and focus on what you know. And then you start climbing the tree and you can climb the tree with a there's all sorts of great links in terms of giving very basic guidance to people. So you can start climbing your tree and adding people. And the help system I found to be very useful. There's a it's up on the upper right hand corner on the sides. And you can use that to just ask questions and or not ask questions, but you can drill through certain areas like how do I source how do I it's well organized and it's linked. So if you're not on the exact topic, you might find a link to what you're trying to get. And if you your answers aren't there, there's this G2G system where you can you can ask ask questions. And it's very it's I would say it's very kind of new people. So they might they might send you to link. But you won't be mocked or ridiculed for asking dumb questions. So there is no as they say there's no then question. So at some point, and this is where I just got so excited about Wicked Tree, I don't know. I don't know why it was, but I had I had my snoopy moment, if you will, my snoopy dance moment. And you got my snoopy dance moment was when I connected to someone that was already on the tree. I think in my case, it was on my Porterfield lines, which is my maternal grandmother. And what I found is that and there's this is a well documented line. There's a book about it, you know, they go to the 1400s with a couple. Yeah, so someone had written a book about what's now 90 years ago. There was pretty well document had some errors, but but in general, it was it was extremely good. So someone had built that lineup like three or 400 years back. It was pretty cool. I went and worked on that and added documentation provided more detail in the stories, but the tree was already built for me. So that was really, really cool. So and I've had many of those. And after that, I've had many cases where other people have researched common third and fourth and fifth grandparents out there. So you get to work with them. And great things can happen for that. Just documenting things. So I give an example, somebody was working on my stepbrothers line and we started talking and it was a fourth or fifth cousin. He actually, you know, make this a short story. At the end of the day, we become friendly. I help him out with a with a gap in this Dulaney family line. And I ended up sending me an image of my stepbrothers grandmother as a child. And then he sends me nothing. Well, so what's your dress? So so he sent me the actual picture for that. So so things like that are really exciting when you can collaborate that level and share details. And I've done the same for for some other people. So so I've kind of talked so one of the things I like about wiki tree is I I always loved wiki. I like the concept of wikipedia in the early days, where it was for notable information. I just love the way it presented information. So you could click and you know, back to my example of having a whole bunch of competence and cyclopedias on my desktop. I just kind of like that idea, not having as much I like the smell of encyclopedias. I like the idea of being able to just click click click through things. So so I think this is one of the areas where wiki tree really excels. So so what I presented here is just I chose one of the profiles. It wasn't too big. But one that I thought was that I'd created for my great grandfather. And I had some weird facts to that I'd come across for him. So so I had a little more of a bio to to you know, you don't for those for some people, you just don't have a lot to say besides who because you don't know about them. This is someone I didn't know. I didn't know the man because he died at a relative unfortunately at a relatively early age. But you know, his his death in an oil field got well documented through through different sources. So I've got information on him. But one of things. So I'm going to talk about the profiles in in two different sections. So the top of the profile, the section right here is very much like your your genealogy databases. When you enter, I'm not going to get into how you create these profiles in terms of the editing mode, but you have an editing mode where you can enter husbands and brothers and sons and things like that and describe the types of relationships. You also have and then you have a biography section that you can you can do some advanced things such as you do footnoting with footnotes, or you can just write you can just start typing away. And so and you don't have to do fancy formatting. There's simple ways to put links in the profile. So you just put a couple brackets around things, for example. So it's a little bit of a I was comfortable that because I have a technical background and I and I've done some editing on Wikipedia. It can be a little bit technical. But what you do is you just go into other people's profiles, say, oh, I wish mine looked like that. And then see how they did it. And it's not done. You know, once you do it five or 10 times, it becomes kind of second nature. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about DNA later. You can put pictures that show up on the profile. I don't have a lot of great pictures from him. This was a one taken from a group family picture. So so then the rest of the profile. So you can do things like this. You can also have different headings. I didn't have that much to say about him. So I didn't have a lot of subheadings. I do have one subheading here for he's kind of unfortunately had a kind of a tragic story. His life ended up short and lived in a lot of pain. But anyway, I'm moving on. Maybe I should choose a different example. So this is the family of he had he had three children. So I organized it that way because I like to see it in the biography with these links. And then also I'm kind of a big fan of sourcing. So I've got all the sourcing here. Some of I linked up particular parts of the article. This is considered the best way of sourcing, but not you don't have to do it that way. And then there's other ways. If you're just going to throw in a bibliography and information, you can put information in there. So this is an example where someone's relatively close to me. We do want real source information. But but if you've got first or second hand information about that people that people knew them, it's legitimate to just put that in. If you put in something as a source, say for, you know, some Scottish king and say it's, you know, handed down through unsourced trees, that's not really considered much of a source. So you have to be somewhat close to the, to the event or the people to, to actually just put in information like that I just because sort of. You've also got links. You got a lot of areas over here for collaboration. So there's, there, what Wikitry is trying to do is make it as easy as possible on a single page is to build out your profiles. So, so I don't use this a whole lot, but it's what I do. It's, I do find it useful. So, so those two pages kind of break down your main profile. So this is sort of the heart of Wikitry. And this is where you're going to, at least I spend the majority of my time putting things in. So, so that's a little bit about what a profile page looks like. There is, I talked a little bit about privacy. There is a respect for privacy that I like what they do with privacy, because a lot of like GEDCOM exports and imports, it's very binary in terms of is the person dead or alive and maybe didn't really tag him properly, whether they're alive or dead. But what, what Wikitry allows you to do is have, is, is if you're the profile manager, and the profile manager is, we use the term manager versus owners, you don't have, you're not lured and got over that profile, but you're sort of more of a coordinator manager, you're managing that profile. But if you let's say you've got someone that's passed away, and there's recently or in some timeframe that there's still sensitive stories that would impact living members, we let you, we still let you, there's still the ability for those profiles to be hidden and protected. So, but at some point in the, where the marker is right now, if someone was born more than 150 years ago, or they died more than 100 years ago, they must be open. So you can't just protect large swaths of the tree. So it's a, it's an interesting, you know, sort of shades of gray in terms of how you do privacy. So we came a little more private in 2018. There's this law that was passed in the European Union called GDPR, which, which put significant fines on exposing information, particularly on living people didn't affect anybody that's passed away. But one of the major change was living members that weren't members have to be completely unlisted or completely private, basically. You might have seen some sections on DNA. This DNA is always kind of hard to explain in terms of, I find a little hard to explain sometimes when the wiki tree is, because people want to first say, oh, well, you must store. And so how do you store? How do I import the DNA into, into wiki tree? Well, the answer is you don't. So I'll start at the bottom of the slide. We don't store match the DNA results. What we do is we store the record of the tests you've made. And then as you go through the profiles, I'll show this on the next screen, you can see which cousins you might, who's, who have tested, but not necessarily did you match to. So if you went to Ancestor in my heritage or my living or family tree DNA, those basically show you people that you matched to. They don't show people you didn't match to. So, so for those third and fourth cousins, you can find people that you won't find on any other of the, any of the other DNA websites. But if you talk to those people, you might be able to find matches that, you know, that they've got on their tree that you don't have on yours, but you would have never known about them. Because wiki tree uses the fact that they're in the tree and they've taken a test on a common ancestor. So it's, it can be really useful. They, with wiki tree, we use the normal autosommel stuff and then you've got the Y and the X and the mitochondrial DNA for the, for the female side of the tree. So for example, on my Porterfield side, they go back really far. So there's, there's only one Porterfield so far when you get some more. But as you go back, the Y will, if you go back to the original Porterfields, that person will show us a possible connection. On the autosommel, it goes back, I should know the number six or seven generations, I think, to the point where autosommel really starts finding, it becomes so deluded that it's not, they're, you're not going to find real matches at that level. So then here's an example of the DNA connection. So over on the blue side here, my Malacote line, I, there's one Malacote that took a Y DNA test. So those are always interesting. I don't have Y DNA for Malacotes. So it's not a great interest to me. And then I show up here with some other Malacotes. So these are basic opportunities to collect. Interesting. I wonder why Ed Malacote doesn't have, oh, he probably didn't do Y DNA test. So these are people that are, you can collaborate on, on surname work. So, and on, on that part of your tree. So I'm interested in certain, I have four or five surnames that I've, that I focus on very heavily. And Malacote's one of them since it is my maternal great grandmother's line. So, so I, so we talked a little bit about profiles. And, you know, that's court of wiki tree. But there's also other ways in which to collaborate beyond just finding cousins. So what I've done on this slide is, and this is, I would probably say this is still incomplete. It's very incomplete about just, but it'll give you an idea of some of the ways you can collaborate. So geographic collaboration, and the way, and some of the ways you collaborate on, let me think, on almost all of these, these have projects behind them. So projects are things on wiki tree rejoining. It's basically have a group of common interests. Some of the, excuse me, some of the profiles more active, like Scotland, for example, they'll send me an email every year. Do I still want to be contributing to this project? So I'm fascinating on one, I'm fascinated on Scotland. For one of my, I just, I sort of identify more with my Scottish roots, although I'm thinking I probably have more English roots than, than Scottish. If I looked at percentages of, of DNA, but so I, I, I'd focus on a couple counties in Scotland. I've been over there and done some genealogy, you know, visited the museum or the archives and stuff like that. So you can go join different geographic projects. Population and era based groups, if you will, there's a lot of really passionate groups on both Magna Carta, Mayflower. I've got to, I've got two Mayflowers. I'm not involved in the project because you can, you know, because there's only 24 hours of the day on the planet Earth. So it just, you just run out of time at some point. The Huguenots, I'm kind of interested in. I've got one Huguenot relative. And then I started working on pre 1500, because my port of fields go pre 1500 a little bit. And I started getting into, I don't know why I even got into this, but you just sort of go down this rattle. I got involved in the, I'm going to probably mispronounce it, but the Dalriada DALRI, ATA that were group people that moved back and forth between Scotland and Ireland. So I worked on, on that part of the tree a long, long time ago. Also for people that are more generous and kind and patient, I'm not sure if I've fallen into that category all the time. There's different programs to help other people here. So there's a mentor program. There's the greeters program for new people. There's help page development, training videos, a lot of people, a lot of people do. The training videos also get into an area we'll be talking about later today than I'm on a recorded video for is the, there's an ambassador program. So if you want to reach outside of wiki tree, the, I was a mentor for, I'm trying to think which group it was a mentor. Yeah, I think it was a mentors. So there's a group, if you people that 24 by seven watch the tree for, for evil doers, if you will, there are people that come in and just do damage to the tree because they apparently have nothing better to do in life. So there's folks. We signed up for an hour or two slots a week and we'll watch it for certain behavior on the tree, excessive deletions. I found that to be interesting. So I did it for a few years and then moved on to other things. I'm also kind of a data wonk. So where I've sort of got interested in wiki tree is on what's called the data doctoring program, which is trying to clean up profiles. wiki tree has this project through the wiki, what's something called wiki tree plus, which one of the team members built up over time that does a phenomenal job of analyzing the data on wiki tree for, for inconsistencies and things that are incorrect. So think about these, there's, there's a jet come analyzers out there, think of jet come analyzers and multiple times 10 in terms of the things that, that they find that are inconsistent. So it's really useful tool to, to help improve the accuracy of wiki tree over time. Profile improvement. I enjoy, this is an area where we, they encourage people to take basic profiles that have just sort of been imported in or it just has one or two lines and, and, and tell the story about that person. And, you know, there's, there's, you know, if you've got a census record, you can talk about them being a farmer. So there's always something you can put in, in better sentence form, I think, then, then, then making it look like it's just something from a genealogy database. Connectors I enjoy working with trying to connect as many people together as possible. And there's an arborist program, which is kind of cleverly named. These are the people that merge, merge parts of the trees together. So, so I do some merging on the within wiki tree. So I was talking about projects. There are, so there's, there are also the other type of project are surname projects. So surname projects are, you know, basically, there's also a group in the UK called that does one name studies that we sort of work closely with. So surname projects are ones where I'm focused on Porterfield name. I tend to do most the editing for this project, but over time I wouldn't make people adding adding more content here. So I put information that we put information in my case about sources I've broken out the different groups with this goal of trying to get all the Porterfield stuff, you know, get them all connected at it's probably a pipe dream, but hopefully we get, we get more, we can get deeper on some of the Porterfield lines that we can't track back to Scotland right now. So there's also, if you like, there's also, this is my stinking badges page, if you will, to quote an old movie. There's also people ways that wiki tree and other wiki treeers can recognize you. So there's, there's basic ones like the new sign up, you got a wiki tree genealogist. There's also things that I'll talk about in a moment, maybe connect, connectathon and previous session Chris and some other folks had talked about the various connectathons. I use wiki tree for cemetery work also and excuse me, pre-1500 certified. So there's different thing and I'm DNA tested. So you can tag your profile. So when people look at you they know what you're interested in and maybe what you've done. So it's a, it's a little bit of a brag page, I guess too. So so one of the, one of the things with wiki tree is we're always constantly striving to make the tree more accurate. One of the big knocks on, there's different, you know, single person family trees out there. And one of the knocks is they tend, they can be inaccurate. And if I, and I certainly can't tell you that ours is 100% accurate, I would tell you that there is that, that we have an army, a small army of people focused on making, making sure whatever's in the tree is correct. And if it's not correct, we have ways of modifying the profile. For example, by having a research notes section on a particular person, if you really, really don't know what the father is or, or there's some doubtful, you know, sometimes there's shades of gray on in terms of whether this is really a child or not. So we can actually put that in, in words, and describe the research we've done, versus just putting a tag on it that says doubtful, but we can do it, we can put a tag on it says it's doubtful, but you can actually explain what the level of research we have right now with the idea being that more researchers can come in and add to that. So and provide, and I've been able to do that. And I've had people where once I put research notes on, they come in and say, oh, well, I've got this source, or I, you know, if it's, if it's recent enough, I know actually, I actually knew these people, so I can, you know, so I can add more information. So again, a great place for collaborating there in terms of collaboration is a great way to make the tree more accurate. So, so there's a lot of different tools taught this, this, and this is the innovative database selection, I should probably just call it wiki tree plus is what it's known as. That's a whole another conversation in itself. The merging is done to create a merging project, the arbiters, arborists take care of that. Pre-1700, pre-1500 was an area where there's a lot of what's in a kind, a lot of imagination in terms of profiles that weren't properly documented. So one of the things over time is pre-1700 and pre-1500 is a little bit more locked, particularly pre-1500. It's a little more locked down because it's pretty well built out and, and there's certain areas that could be built out a little bit better, but, but yeah, you need very specialized skills to do that. So when the Jed come in, I taught a little bit, we only, we don't let you import the world anymore. So they have to be people born after 1700. And there's a process for reviewing the duplicates. And back to accuracy, we cite sources, we collaborate, and all these topics basically are focused on making the tree more accurate, which is a really major part of the effort around here. So socialization on wiki tree. I have talked about when I joined wiki tree, it was all about the tree. There is a huge social side to wiki tree that, there's probably, there's people that participated more than I do, but you can do team building things like when you do the, we have these events, the thongs, if you will, where we have a three day weekend where we do sourcing, we have three day, three day weekends where we, excuse me, where we try to clean up the profile errors, we have three day weekends where we across the year of the year where we try to do connecting. So you, we have, gosh, how many teams do we have? I don't know, maybe 30, 40, 50 teams. I'm on a really small team of pre 1500. We just, because there's just not a lot of those people out there, they're certified, but there's people that are organized by geography. There's, there's people that are on, they have clever names, they get on discord channels. So they, they, they turn it into like a three day party. And then during these thongs, some of the people at Wigatree, well, every four hours, they'll have a little get together and see how things are going, give out some, some, some awards and, and, and giveaways. So it's, it's a very, it's a, it kind of sucks you into more to doing something more than just adding your, adding your great, great, great, great grandparents in. There's also something called ambassadors. We'll be talking about how they actually get, did a recorded session for that, that shows, that happens in an hour after this session. And we'll be, we'll be answering questions there, but ambassadors is a broad category of people that do outreach, whether we do, there's people that do talks like this. There's people that, there's people that do blogging about Wigatree. There's people that do social media. There's people that do videos. So all of those things, if it's, if it's outbound, trying to tout the, the wonders of Wigatree, those are all, that all falls under our ambassadors umbrella. There's a lot of thanking and being thanked. That's kind of cool when you first start getting used to it or getting into Wigatree. Picture of the week, profile of the week, member of the week. There's people sitting around, you know, searching out, searching out these things to, to acknowledge an award and various members. So it's, it's, it's kind of nice. I think it was profile week, long, long time ago. They, they just, people just find you when you're out here working. So on the site. And I talked about badges before. And then the GDG, for new people, I would strongly suggest you spend some time in the, in the GDG area. And then the Discord server, it's a wonderful thing. I was on it this morning. I just think I just need training for it. So, but I, you know, not just saying bad about Discord, it just, there's so many things, so many aspects to Wigatree. You can't do them all. So sorry for picking on Discord a little bit today. So a couple final slides here is, so as part of the various community channels, I think there's going to be an announcement later today of what we're doing in 2024. But we started in 2021, they started these different challenges. So AJ Jacobs, who I think was, was, had a presentation earlier this week as part of the, the first two days of Wigatree days. We had some big names. I mean, CC Moore, Wigatree, Henry Lois Gates, from PBS fame. So we, and I sat on a couple of these, I sat on, who's I sit on? Oh, CCs. It was interesting. So we do research for a week or two for this one. And then we present the research. And it was interesting talking to CC. She's like, I do this for a living. So I just haven't spent much time on my tree. And she brought her son in, I think, on the meeting. So, so there's a, there's a startup, there's a kickoff and then a, I present the results aspect of this. So that was kind of cool. And then they recast it in, in 2022 and focused on famous people. I didn't participate a lot in this one. So I don't know if they actually did brought people in, probably not Robbie Coltrane, but, but the, but they brought people in for, for the presentation. And, or to do the research. And this year, they focused on different community challenges. So they went after different groups and said, can you give us, I think it was eight or 10 profiles. And then we'll have a small army of Wigatree volunteers like doing this, we'll research those profiles and see what we can find. So, so I'm looking forward to what the 2024 Wigatree challenge will be. And so my Wigatree interest, you probably kind of figured this out from what I've focused on that I thought was, was interesting, but finding more ancient ancestors is a big thing for me. I like, I like the writing biographies, wiki, wiki style. I think wiki tree is one of the best places for writing biographies, because you can actually, rather than just jump out the working, actually make them look like an attractive story. You can add images on your stories, you can have formatting, you can, you can make them look like a, like a mini book almost. CERN name studies is a big thing for me, data doctoring, collaborating with other members. I do a fair amount of that. And the famous people are kind of interesting. I just, it's sort of a, if I'm bored, I might go check some of my connections. I'm going to be Gary Chapin fan, by the way. Don't spend a lot of time on that local history. Actually, in the last few years, I've been in a lot more with getting our tree town founders on, on wiki tree. And they're not related to me at all, because I didn't, I didn't grow up in this town, but I also went team captain for some of the wiki thongs. I'll kind of share that and kind of sitting doing a second seat on that these days. And finally, the project that was opened up a few years ago, I can update this slide. The, yeah, two years ago, I don't know when I was, but there's this connectors project that they now have gone through the database and done this seat, what's called a CC7 project. So it's the connected, it's a connection count of seven degrees from your profile. So I went from 1300 to 16 and I actually just kicked over 2000. So I've got to update that in the last, recently. So, so that that's kind of an interesting project. So, so what are the challenges? I, this slide used to say wiki tree challenges, but that actually has a meaning in our community. So, so what, what, why a wiki tree may not be for you or what might she get frustrated in? Because, you know, I can, I'm a big fan, but it's not for everybody to be perfectly honest. It's not always easy to collaborate. So the, for people that are, that are my age group used to get a report card, you know, written on paper and it used to say, does he play well with others or did he play well with others? If you didn't get that checkbox, you're probably going to struggle the wiki tree. If you, if you, you know, it's my way of the highway kind of mentality. There is always, there often is confusion about or disagreement perhaps over things, but it's, you know, you basically go to the sources if you don't agree on something. Biographies can be hard work. I, I find writing, I struggle with writing. I think a lot of, a lot of wiki treeers, I think a lot of genealogists do. It can be a little challenging, understand the wiki tree markup language. Start small, copy from other people. You don't have to write these big elegant profiles when you start. I've heard people, other people that are not fans of wiki tree saying, well, you know, I went in there and found an old profile that was in bad shape. And I said, well, yeah, that's just an opportunity. But I think over time we've got a very, the older profiles and the poorly, poorly sourced profiles are getting cleaned up. We're getting less of them every day. So we still have work to do in that area. Another challenge with wiki tree, it's just, it's just one other genealogy tool knocking on your door. So I'm not saying people should wiki tree should be the end all for everybody. But it's something I would encourage you to have in your tool kit if you will. So so a little bit just to summarize, I hope you got a basic understanding of wiki tree. It is a hard topic for me, I find to just, it's not something you can put a box around and explain the entire thing in one sitting. I hope you got a little basic understanding of one way to get started. And I hope that you gathered from, there's certain things that I enjoy doing wiki tree that if you talk to six other wiki treeers, like for example, if you sat in on the previous session with Chris and, and, and some of the other team, they all have different things they get out of wiki tree. And I'm kind of in the same boat, there's certain things I like about wiki tree, or certain areas I focus on wiki tree, there's others that, hey, it's a really useful thing for other people, but it's not me. So, so hopefully, at least entice you to, to, if you're not a wiki tree user to put in your toolkit. And if you are using wiki tree or haven't used it a whole lot, I hope I've, I hope that I've given you a couple ideas of terms of different things you could do with wiki tree. So anyway, that is my session for today. Thanks everybody for attending. And I'm going to jump over to the chat to see if there's anything, I think, Azure or someone who's going to be monitoring the chat, is there any, is there anything we need to talk about into any questions that came up that, that I can answer? Yeah, yeah, there were a few, there were a few questions. And then I just wanted to share, Kay Knight, she's excited with your presentation, she's going to share it with the genealogical society that she's with, so that they can review it in advance of her presentation that she's going to do in spring, in the spring. So that was really cool. And then we have Stephanie Hill, she says her year anniversaries tomorrow, she joined after watching last year's wiki tree day videos. So that's exciting. And we have Eric Lavra watching the wiki tree app session now, but he just wanted to say thanks to you, as it was this presentation last year, that convinced him to start using wiki tree. Yeah, he's one, he's a local, he's in our local group. So that's great. I may turn the man love to him, he's pretty, he's kind of going on wiki tree. So. And then we have a user who's saying that they found out about wiki tree through her mom, and Brunson said 1754 is her mom. She's excited to be here and learn things. We do have a question from Wayne about creating a profile for each family member. And this is added to an overall tree. This is different than other genealogy sites that have charts. Well, you certainly have, there's, there are charts available for the information to enter in. The thing that's different here is, like if you have a, like I use family, I still use family tree makers as a genealogy program. And I'm still an ancestry, but an ancestry, there are, you know, probably 100,000 versions of English royalty, for example, here on wiki tree, there's one and you, you, you all sync up with them. So like an, like an ancestry type system or other ones, you just copy people and rather information. And it's, you have this phenomenal challenge of propagating errors. So if we have errors in wiki tree, just as one example, is you get it corrected in one place and you can have a lively discussion as to, you know, whether this person was really a child or, or not. So, but yeah, so it's, it's the single occurrence of one person versus private occurrences of all these different ancestors in, in each person's database. So it can be a challenge sometimes. I've, you know, you can get in little, yeah, it can be a challenge sometimes if you don't agree on facts. I, I haven't really run into those. I know other people have so. Okay. And the next question is from Ann and she's asking, what are degrees? I'm thinking, I'm going to take a guess as this is the talking about the connection count of seven. They're like seven degrees. Like there's the old joke about this. I don't know how it started, but one of the people we have is we, there's the running joke about the Kevin Bacon's been in a movie with almost everybody in Hollywood. So there's this thing called the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. And it's sort of paired. It sort of is similar to that. And we actually have Kevin Bacon's genealogy. So you can find out how related you are to Kevin. And I'm actually related in distant, distant fashion. But the, the degrees of the, so like for anybody like my wife, my, my children, I'm one degree away. My son's wife, I'm two degrees away. My son's children, I'm two degrees away. The, and then you end up going sort of like, sort of back and forth on your, on your tree in some ways. So for some people, so it's not, so I'm, you end up with this, if you're trying to, to do the count, if you're trying to bump up your counts, there's this weird aspect of your, your rooting for multiple marriages and divorces to bump up your count. I shouldn't say it that way, but, and then your, your hope, your root, and if you're from the US, you're hoping you got a lot of those folks that are farmers in the 1800s that had 18, you know, I've got, I've got one family with 26 kids and another with, okay, two, two wives and another with 24 kids. I think that was with two wives. So those, those are great for your connection counting, but, but somebody has 20,000 to 30,000 now. I have no idea how that is physically possible. So yeah. So degree is just the distance from you. So it could be a step sibling or, you know, it's just how far away that person is from you on the tree, basically. And then Anne has another question. Can she do a tribute to my late BDF? Yeah. So you can set up pages, particularly if she's unfortunately, you know, I understand she's passed. So once people have passed away, you can certainly set up tribute pages. If it's something recent, I would probably, and you're going to share very personal information, I would coordinate with family members, but, you know, so just be aware it's out on the internet, but, but I've certainly done that with people with my ancestors. And one of the things I still have to do is I haven't done enough for my mom and dad. I should really have great pages out there for them. They were really great people, but so on a list. The never ending list. So Sandy is asking, how do I find famous people I'm related to? So I can drop that into the chat with a link for the connections. If you want to talk about that, I'll take care of that. Yeah. And if you look at my profile, number one, you'll, I did some of that. So I, at one point, I did all the presidents and the Magna Carta. So I put some of that in my profile. So yeah. So, and if you go to like Chris actually answered the question for us, I guess, so if you click connections under the my wiki tree pull down menu, it takes you to that page and you can then go to featured connections. And that'll show you what the featured connections are, but you can also just search for, if there's somebody you have in mind, you can search for that person on wiki wiki tree and then check your connection to them. All right. Well, I think that was, that's the last question. Thank you, Marty, for one another wonderful presentation this year. Thanks for the invite. All right. Thank you everybody for tuning in. We have next up on the schedule for today. Coming up next on this main stage will be the wiki word search. And that's going to be a live game at 1015 Eastern Standard Time. Also at 10am next up is the making a great German profile that's from the Germany project. And out on the apps and extension stream, we have starting out with the wiki tree browser extension with Greg Clark and Marie Maloney. So that's all great content today. And I've pinned to the top of the live chat the welcome landing page that has links and event information for it for today. So again, thank you everybody for tuning in and we'll see you around. Bye.