WikiTree surpasses 34 million profiles!

Question

On Saturday, April 8, 2023 (9:28 a.m. CST), WikiTree has now surpassed 34 million profiles.

• 29,126,259 profiles are connected to each other
  • 28,185,837 (previous million)
• 11,402,330 profiles with DNA test connections
  • 10,953,651 (previous million)
• 992,061 members
  • 967,052 (previous million)
• 1,146,197 profiles added since 1 Jan 2023
  • 11,695.88 profiles per day added
• 85 days ago we surpassed 33 million profiles
  • previous million took 102 days
• 2 Jul 2023 is the projected date for another million profiles to have been added

Connection Badges

• 17,352 members have the 1,000 Connections badge
• 5,064 members have the 2,000 Connections badge
• 462 members have the 5,000 Connections badge
• 31 members have the 10,000 Connections badge

33 million profiles were surpassed on Friday, January 13, 2022.

WikiTree contained 32,853,803 profiles at the start of January 1, 2023.

32 million profiles were surpassed on Monday, October 3, 2022.

31 million profiles were surpassed on Saturday, July 2, 2022.

30 million profiles were surpassed on Wednesday, March 23, 2022.

WikiTree contained 29,096,364 profiles at the start of January 1, 2022.

29 million profiles were surpassed on Tuesday, December 21, 2021.

28 million profiles were surpassed on Friday, September 3, 2021.

27 million profiles were surpassed on Monday, May 24, 2021.

26 million profiles were surpassed on Saturday, February 13, 2021.

WikiTree contained 25,540,910 profiles at the start of January 1, 2021.

Comments

Lots of numbers - but how are you defining "member"? I get a lot of 'new member' noticies; the majority have just a name, no bio, note that 'my family tree is on a different site".  I find these annoying - are we just making lists of names for the sake of bragging about a large 'membership"? or are there some basics that are required?

---

Sharon, in Wikitree-speak a "member" is anybody who has ever created a Wikitree account. As of today, 223,991 members have signed the Honor Code.

The number of members who actually contribute on a regular basis is probably about 20,000. Less than 3,000 members make more than 100 contributions per month, and probably stand for most of the work - see discussion below.

I don't know why Wikitree chooses to promote the number of login accounts over any other more meaningful number, but it certainly has a "wow" effect until you start to ponder the realities.

Answer 1

Hey Tommy, thanks for the breakdown. Maybe a profile challenge or recognition for added profiles would motivate members to add profiles. If 1/2 the members add one profile per week that's 2 million profiles per month. Just a thought.

Comments

The problem is, half the members wouldn't even see the challenge. Most members sign up, create their own profile, maybe their parents, if they're lucky go back far enough to get onto the global tree, and then they're gone. A bit more than 20% of members have signed the Honor Code, for instance. Probably most of the nearly 1 million members haven't logged in in the last year, just guessing. (This is true for most sites. I created a Twitter account once, years ago, never posted anything, now I don't know the password or account name).

So if you do create a challenge on G2G & e-mail updates, you'd probably only reach maybe 10% of the members? Participation rate in a challenge is an additional issue.

Answer 2

Wow, similar to the last million connected profiles we now also have a "fast" million of added profiles. It seems to me that there are consistently more profiles created a day. Is that because there are more members creating more profiles, because they stay longer or because more profiles are created because the members want to increase their CC7?

Answer 3

Wow!  So close to 1 Million Member Profiles!!!

Answer 4

Tommy, do we have a number for active member profiles?

It's all looking very positive.

Thanks for posting the numbers.

Comments

The number of active members is of course dependent on your definition of "active". The number of members who make more than 1,000 contributions per months is about 500. Another 2,000 makes more than 100 contributions each month. Below that, there has to be a long tail of members with ever less contributions. A ballpark estimate of the number of members who may be considered "active" with at least a few contributions each year may be about 20,000.

And, as has been said before, the ratio of profiles per member was fairly constant at 33 and something for years, but has apparently grown to above 34.3 ATM. This may mean that more people are hanging around now.

---

Maybe there are less people just uploading Gedcoms and leaving. I know that at some time past the rules about Gedcoms were changed. Though I'm not sure if that line of thinking makes sense.

Since I joined in Oct 2019, I think I see less G2G posts complaining about sourcing and other requirements. Maybe the people staying are more serious researchers.

Or perhaps the many changes over the past 2 years such as connections within categories and other projects have attracted new members or given existing members reasons to stay and work on topics that are not just their personal family history.

I know that the connections within categories allowed me to work on a cemetery project with connections between all the people buried there that cannot be done on any other family history website.

Maybe WT is just far more interesting!

---

I extracted the contribution numbers from the March 2023 Club 1000 and March 2023 Club 100 pages, put the numbers into Gnuplot and came up with this figure, which probably shows a Pareto distribution:

The cutoff is of course 100 contributions, but one can expect the values to taper off very slowly. Interestingly, you can see a "bump" at 1,000 contribs (y-axis) which is expected, given that many members who see that they are approaching the magic 1,000 number at the end of the month will naturally try to reach for the badge. There's almost certainly a similar bump at the end of the tail caused by the Club 100 badge, but we don't have access to more data.

Somebody more math-minded than me can probably extrapolate the distribution and come up with an approximate number of members with, say, more than 10 contributions for this month. If you want to play with the numbers, send me a PM.

---

Thanks, I understand the numbers and surprisingly know what a Pareto distribution is, but didn't know it had a name.

With a sales background, you get 80% of your sales from 20% of your product.

---

Yes, although I don't believe that the 80/20-principle applies here. If it did, we would have 20 per cent of the members doing 80 per cent of the work. There aren't 200,000 members doing regular work here. but rather one tenth of that. Yet, the curve resembles a Pareto distribution. I can gather data and create a graph, but I'm not sufficiently drilled in maths to explain the hows and whys.

---

Eyeballing the chart above, 500 people made an average of 1200 contributions = 60,000 of the super-active group. Another 2500 people made an average of 240 contributions = 60,0000 of the moderately active group. (I picked 240 because it's reasonably accurate and makes the numbers line up nicely).

So for us, 20% of the people did the same amount of work as the other 80%. Not quite what the 80/20 rule says, but a pretty similar concept.

---

Have I got this right?

500 people x 1200 contributions = 600,000 contributions

2500 people x 240 contributions = 600,000 contributions

So 3000 people made 1,200,000 contributions in March 2023.

How many total contributions were made in March? I looked for a number, but didn't have a good idea of where to look.

My thought it would give a good estimate of how many members of the 992,773 on the home page are even a little active.

---

The exact sum of the contribs in the graph above is 1,624,749, by 2873 members.

We know that more than 300,000 profiles are added each month, and the number of contributions must be a multiple of that, probably somewhere between 5 and 10. So I'm guessing that the members in Club 1000 and Club 100 stand for roughly half the work.

---

Thanks, that helps

Answer 5

The total of people here on WikiTree is about the same as the population of Saudi Arabia. Nice. =D Soon we will have every human who has ever lived!! Well...at least from 1000 AD to the present. But, it's still a lot!

Answer 6

Thank you for posting this, Tommy! Great data compilation.

Much appreciated.

Answer 7

I'm inspired by numbers. Thanks for sharing this! I haven't been active recently on contributing to WikiTree because my time is so incredibly limited. This inspired me to add at least 100 a month, if possible. If I can't do that, I could try to do the equivalent of 10 per week.