Do you want lists of unconnected branches by Last Name At Birth?

Question

Aleš has been amazing in creating reports for connectors, like the lists of unconnected branches by country and county/department/Land/province/state/territory. I don't think that it would be going too far to say that the amazing progress that Connectors have been able to make in connecting up a higher percentage for profiles to the main tree every single month for years now is largely due to Aleš's tireless efforts in creating helpful reports like that.

Just this morning, I thought that I should ask him to work up similar reports, listing unconnected branches that include particular Last Names at Birth (and sorted by the number of people with that Last Name At Birth in the branch, rather than by branch size), to list on One Name Studies pages and the Let others know what surnames you are working on page. But I'm always pestering him to do new reports, and he always does them because he's an amazing guy. So this time, I actually thought about it for a bit before asking him (you know, for a change) and decided to ask if anybody else would find reports like that useful before asking Aleš to put in all the working creating them.

So if you think you would find a report like that useful, please comment here. If there are tweaks that you'd like to see compared with the location reports, please note them. And, if there is enough interest, then I will pester Aleš.

Comments

Thanks for asking the question! I'm challenged when it comes to asking WikiTree+ the right questions, so this discussion was helpful!

Answer 1

You can do such reports online. Search for Slade unconnected and you will get all the profiles. In last column there is a "tree link" that will show the complete group. You can also add not unlinked to remove profiles without any connection.

https://plus.wikitree.com/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=Slade+unconnected+not+unlinked&MaxProfiles=1000

Comments

Yes, Aleš. That's similar to the search I run for countries that you haven't created country reports for (most recently, I was doing searches for Turkey). And clicking in the tree link in the last column gives me the branch size, which is how I select branches connected to a given country with at least 50 profiles. But your country reports make things much easier for me, because they're sorted by branch size.

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I added the tree size to search results.

https://plus.wikitree.com/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=+Ljubljana+unconnected

I also improved the Groupby field if you select Connected to display tree sizes

https://plus.wikitree.com/function/WTWebProfileGroup/GroupBy.htm?Field=Connected&query=Ljubljana+unconnected.

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Oh, thank you, Aleš! That's wonderful! I'll use that search from now on.

Answer 2

Dear Greg,

I have been focused on the US Black Heritage project, though not the Connectors portion.  I think an unconnected report by surname for a particular location could be very useful.  Others?

black_heritage

Answer 3

quote> the amazing progress that Connectors have been able to make in connecting up a higher percentage for profiles to the main tree every single month for years 

I am a long standing Connector and lately feel that this group is NOT valued highly at all, because there has been a lack of attention paid by leadership to the Monthly Connectors Challenge. 

There have been two months now where the regular monthly posting has NOT been made ! There seems to be no one in charge of this "supposedly" regular feature. Hopefully someone in charge will see this message and ensure there will be a September posting for the Monthly Connectors Challenge.

Comments

I can't speak for the leadership, but I personally value the work of Connectors extremely highly. I discovered long ago that I'm abysmally slow at connecting unconnected profiles myself. (I created profiles for a number of Notables, and in several case, it took me well over a year to connect them to the main tree.) So, I have been focusing my work on building various lists of unconnected profiles to help those people who are actually good at connecting find profiles and branches to work on. If it weren't for Connectors, all those lists would just be wasting disk space on the server. But fortunately, Connectors keep connecting branches faster than I can list them.

Answer 4

Hmmm. If you go via the regular search feature on WikiTree (not +) and type in a surname, there comes up a profile list. And on top of that list there is a link "Unconnected". That cuts out all the connected profiles with that surname.

Comments

Yes, that's true, you can get a list of unconnected profiles, but it's not quite what I was looking for. 

The advantage that I see in Aleš's geographic reports is that you can see all the branches with at least one profile for a person who was born, married, or died in a specific country (or, in some cases, subdivisions of a country), sorted by the number of profiles in each branch.

Many Connectors prefer to work with the largest available branches, so they can connect more profiles with the same effort. So I believe that Aleš's report have been very useful because they allow connectors to target the largest branches with a connection to the location they're working on.

So my thinking is, how can we give that same advantage to Connectors who prefer to work on a particular surname, rather than a particular location? That's why I suggested having reports that don't only list the size of the branch, but the number of profiles with the designated Last Name At Birth in that branch. Because you could have a huge branch with only one profile with the surname you're working on, and another branch which is smaller in absolute size, but has a lot more profiles with that Last Name At Birth.

Another drawback of the standard WikiTree unconnected report is that it tops out at 99 connections, and just shows "99+" for branches larger than that. Since the 100 largest unconnected branches all have more than 200 profiles in them, the standard report isn't a good way to identify the largest branches.