There's probably a proper genealogical term for this...

Question

...but I don't know what it is.

Here's what I'm trying to describe: when you add a new profile to WikiTree, and in the process of connecting that profile to the main tree, you end up linking already existing profiles which were already connected to the main tree to each other. It's not "connecting", because the existing profiles were already connected to the anchor profiles (and thus to each other). It's not making a shortcut, because the connection was already there. It just wasn't mapped out on WikiTree yet. (And, as so many books that I have read keep stressing, "the map is not the territory").

Actually, this concept is something that I've been wrestling with how to express for several years now. I read somewhere that experts estimate that everybody in the world is actually within something like 12 degrees of separation from everybody else. But the numbers we're seeing from the Connection Finder are often several times that number. So, are the experts wrong? Possibly, but I'm thinking that we can't actually say that yet. Why? Because we don't actually know how everybody is related. I keep wondering if there's some arcane branch of mathematics that can predict, in general, the way the world family tree is going to map out before it's actually mapped. But if there is, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't understand it, and therefore I wouldn't know whether I would be able to trust its predictions. To me, the real answer is to map it out, and then we'll see how the numbers work out. As of the beginning of January this year, my spreadsheet calculated that there was one WikiTree profile for every 2,456 people born since 1 AD, and even though that's a huge improvement compared to the ratio in March 2016 (which was one WikiTree profile for every 5,729 people born since 1 AD), it's still a long, long way from mapping out the territory.

Comments

Anyway, to illustrate what I mean by linking together existing profiles, let us consider a couple of profiles that I created as part of my work on people with a Last Name At Birth of West. Both of these men have profiles on both ThePeerage.com and Wikipedia, so I created profiles for them, because that moves the numbers on both charts. But then, of course, I wanted to connect them, because I didn't want to see the connected scores going down.

Algernon Edward West was fairly easy to connect, because both his mother-in-law and his maternal grandparents were already on WikiTree. So, I created profiles for his wife and mother, linked them, and, ba-da-bing, Algernon was connected to the main tree. (Compared to the time I spent connecting other notables, that was a breeze.) But what I'm talking about here was that, in connecting Algernon to each of them, I also linked the Greys to the Walpoles and the Churchills. (And, once I created a profile for his father-in-law, I also linked those families to the Barringtons.) And his paternal grandfather is also on WikiTree, so if I can ever find any sources for his father, I'd be able to link all those families to the Wests, too. Currently, Algernon is 11 degrees from his grandfather Temple West. Once Algernon's father is added and linked to both of them, that connection will be shortened to two degrees. (Alas, I didn't think to check the degrees of separation before creating and linking his wife, mother, and father-in-law. It would have been interesting to see how many degrees each connection saved.)

Algernon's cousin Edward West is another case in point. Currently, Edward is 15 degrees from their mutual grandfather West, but once his father Balchen West has a profile created and linked, that should save 13 degrees.

(Edward is a fascinating case anyway. ThePeerage.com actually has duplicate profiles for him: one linked to his wife, and the other to his father. He has entries in Wikipedia and the National Dictionary of Biography. A relative wrote a book on his career in India, and The Gazette lists his knighthood. But nobody has yet knitted all the available sources about him together into a single narrative. He sounds like a fascinating fellow, though. Apparently, he was similar to one of my favourite fictional characters: Judge Pendarvis from H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy books.)

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Milgram's 'six degrees of separation' experiment utilized social networks in the continental US. Worldwide, it must be much more, perhaps 30-50 degrees for a lot of the world, but with some pockets that are virtually uncontactable, such as the remaining uncontacted peoples of South America, and the Andamanese islanders (of whom no one alive has ever successfully contacted them and lived to tell about it).

Genealogically, I bet the degrees are very similar. However, genealogy is more difficult as many areas of the world have very little or nonexistent genealogical records. I guess we could regard the genetic bottleneck of c. 70,000 years ago consisting of roughly 10,000 humans from whom the entire world population is today descended, as our ultimate genealogical starting point, but this is of course far outside the range of traditional genealogy.

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An expert making the (sweeping) statement that everyone is about 12 degrees of separation from everyone else is a conclusion derived from applied statistics. First and foremost I would question the sample size and its representation...  

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Twelve degrees of separation is not the same as Wiki' s degrees of connection.  Degrees of Separation refer to people you know who know people.  Here on Wiki connection means related to people who are related to people.

Answer 1

I don't know the genealogical term for it . For me by making that sort of connections the density of the tree is intensified

The piece of the tree on my watchlist was first only connected by one other profile to the rest of the tree. But now six connecctions do exist  and in the future there only will be more of them. More possible roads to connect to other people, more interweaving of the different branches.More roads and more alternative routes for the connection finder.

Answer 2

Six degrees of separation is a real concept. It came out of the Small World experiment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment

The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States.^[1] The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world-type network characterized by short path-lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase "six degrees of separation", although Milgram did not use this term himself.

Answer 3

Anyway you spin it Greg, I still would call it "connecting".  Keep on connecting!!

Answer 4

One of the main reasons I have been working toward a complete linkage of the 1774 Rhode Island Census to Wikitree profiles is that I would then feel relatively comfortable with the graph completeness on one small part of Wikitree.

Arcane math is my thing, and there are many metrics in the study of graphs. You mention degree of separation, which is the same as maximal path length. But I am interested in average path length, cycle structure, and many more graph metrics. 

Answer 5

I would say that you established a new connection path; sounds like it was also a shorter path to some significant clusters in the Global Tree. That's always nice :-)

I'm not sure there is a term for this in genealogy - I think the WikiTree Connection finder operates somewhere in the territory between genealogy and demography. Is there anywhere else this "game" is played by precisely the same rules as WikiTree?

As for the path you missed observing in its "before" state - shouldn't you be able to check it by crossing out a significant profile from the current shortest path?