Ask Aleš (January 2023)

Question

New month is here and on Wednesday there is a new session of Ask Aleš - What Do You Want To Know About WikiTree Plus?

See you on Wednesdy, January 4, 2023, 9:00 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST). 

If you have any questions for me you are welcome to join online or/and post questions here and I will try to answer them.

This time we will use StreamYard instead of Zoom. Here is a link to join the session online.

If you want to just watch use this Youtube link.

If there will be some time left, I will probably show some details for Cemetery reports.

• WikiTree Cemeteries: Lists all Cemetery Categories.
• FindAGrave Cemeteries: Lists all FindAGrave Cemeteries with wikitree profiles linked to them.

Greg Clarke will be my co-host.

Comments

The meeting time you have nominated is not clear to me. Different countries (like Australia) use the acronym EST (Eastern Standard Time). Is it possible to add a reference to UTC i.e UTC-5?

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If you click the Youtube link above, it will tell you exactly when it starts. That would be in 21 hours at the moment.

That is the way I know when something happens in my local time.

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The time zone you are calling EST is really AEST.  You can check it out here: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/

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Good comment Stu. The general point I want to make is that I think it useful to the connection to UTC, (e.g. UTC-5), to any comment that refers to time zones. This small addition saves me the time and effort to answer the question "What is EST?". I do not live in USA and so the the acronym is not clear to me.

Answer 1

Good morning Aleš!  I have a question - can you show us how to quickly find a Free Space page? I seem to often fumble around, and eventually fall into finding the one I'm looking for ... but there must be smarter / better ways to do so!

There are two separate cases, really.  One - you've created one for a profile you worked on years ago ... and don't really remember what you called it, but you know at least a word or two from the title

The other is one you've visited because you were part of a project, but you were NOT the creator .. but you have an idea of the content.

I think there are probably a couple different strategies for those two cases, based on ownership, one SHOULD be easier to find than the other ... but ... not always for me! :-)

Comments

To find a Space page you created and are still the Profile Manager of. just go to your Watchlist and select Free-Space Profiles, and you will get a list of all your for Free Spaces.

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Greg, there's also an option in the Search page at the bottom to only search free-space pages, which if you remember some part of it's title or content, will probably get a hit

Answer 2

Ales
I've looked at the page for the Wikitree Cemeteries. What is the procedure for adding cemeteries to this page?

Answer 3

Hi Ales,  Not a Question but a request.

I read in this forum (G2G or perhaps APP forum) that I may be able to get access to a dump of the open records.  I wou;d like to help out the Australia Project but writing offline searches.  

The first one would be a dive into a method of identifying unsourced records using an agorithm, and not relying on categories and stickers which are not posted to the majority of unsourced profiles.  (The Australia Project members calculate that less than 10% of unsourced records are accurately categorised as Unsourced.)

Regards,

Craig

Comments

If your intention is to parse biography, then Database dump is not a solution, since Biography is not included.

The only way is to use the WikiTree API to retrieve the bio of a profile.

To get a list of profiles, that are related to Australia, you can use WT+ searches.

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Thanks Ales,  I would still like the dump as there are other searches I would like to attempt and I don't know until I try.

I don't what to retrieve one bio, I want to retrieve ALL bios.  Looks like I cannot do that with any tools currently available, including Wikitree+

I know that I can get a list of profiles for Australia, but then I have to manually parse them, which makes the exercise useless.  I was hoping to shorten that process.  If it is not available then it will not be done.

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I am not sure, but I think Jamie handles the database dump access. You should ask in Apps google group.

I don't think it is possible to get Bios for all profiles. There is only incremental update each week for all changed profiles.

It is also a huge amount of data. On my disk it takes 30Gb in zip files. Unzipped size would be twice that amount in almost 30 million files.

I think API now allows to request the Bios for multiple profiles in a single request using getPeople API call, so it shouldn't be to hard to download the profiles as needed. See: https://github.com/wikitree/wikitree-api/blob/main/getPeople.md

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Thanks Ales.

Answer 4

I hope the correct place as question states January rather than February to ask questions.

I learnt a lot at the Jan session, especially being able to save as a spreadsheet - WOW!

MY Question:

In WikiTree+ I would like to search for the last edit date.

I am aware of the magic word "lastedit2014" but I was looking for between now and then.

I try to avoid doing doctoring on profiles with recent edits, but would like to easily list those that have the last edit before say 2020 as an example.