WikiGames 2024 - It's A Wrap!

WikiGames! Do you know what they are? They are events held by WikiTree to encourage the community to help improve the collaborative tree. This year was the 2nd annual WikiGames and as of the time of writing this post, they’ve just wrapped up. We had a spectacular time!

What is WikiTree? If you are not familiar with WikiTree, it is a freely-available, collaborative genealogy site, with a shared family tree structure. This means that the goal is to have 1 profile for each person that lived and the community works collaboratively to source and provide biographical profiles for each person.

What did we do during WikiGames? Over the course of two weekends, we had 4 “gaming events” for profiles on the site:

• Sourcing Slalom - add sources to profiles that don’t have any

• Date Diving - add birth/marriage/death dates to profiles that need them

• Cross-Country Connecting - connect profiles of family members together

• Long-Distance Locating - add birth/marriage/death locations to profiles that need them

As you can see, these activities help create better profiles for the overall tree.

How is it organized? For the WikiGames, all of the volunteer genealogists are divided into teams. We had 12 teams and I was team captain of the Glorious Gingkos! (each team has a tree name). All contestants participated in 10-hour sprints (or “heats”) for each event. For motivation and encouragement, we also have periodic YouTube live streams to check-in and share updates; I enjoy being a co-host on those!

How much work was done? Thanks to more than 100 volunteers working together, a lot of good work was done to improve the health of the tree. Across all 4 events, more than 22,410 profiles were collectively improved upon; including:

• Sourcing Slalom - 5,943 profiles sourced

• Date Diving - 2,797 profiles got dates added

• Cross-Country Connecting - 8,557 profiles connected to family members

• Long-Distance Locating - 5,566 profiles got locations added

This is incredible work by everyone! Our efforts help make the tree healthier.

How did my team do? My team, the Glorious Gingkos, won 3rd place on the last event, Long Distance Locating - our team members added dates to 653 profiles. One of our team members, ranked in 2 of the events — Jayme Arrington won 2nd place in the Date Diving Event and 2nd place in the Long Distance Locating event. Way to go team! #CollaborativeGenealogy at its finest.

How did I do? The first weekend of the event, I was sick, so I only participated in the Cross-Country Connecting and Long Distance Locating events. I was able to connect 25 profiles to family members and add dates to 122 profiles. I watched movies while working on them — Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Interstellar, and The Prestige. You get bonus points if you tell me what all three movies have in common 😁.

Do you want to participate with us next time? Our next community event is focusing on adding sources and occurs from October 4-7th. Let me know if you want to join us and I can help get you on board; here is more info too.

I 💖WikiTree!