Question about CC7 connections

Question

Why I havee such a small amount of connections is what I don't quite understand. While I see people with less than 10 contributions having over 1000 connections and myself less than 500 connections and yet 1881 contributions, I wonder...why does the badge award signify as far as research, when you clearly have not made the effort? (as I always thought that those were earned due to accomplishments) So, it's a bit confusing for me. What am I doing wrong? Would it be better to simply add a profile with a single source, in a few minutes?

Comments

A couple observations: I see it doesn't take long for you to get to Poland and Canada. In that same timeframe, I am working several generations in the same geographic location, both paternal and maternal and in laws. Secondly, if you want to increase cc7 start building your tree sideways. Fill in spouses and children of cousins you have already added. My cc7 exploded when I went back and started to add second and third wives and their families. Once I have reached 7*, I move to another person/profile and fill in the blanks. Sometimes I catch myself, asking myself, why? I guess if it weren't for the cc7, I wouldn't know of the quirky connections I have with some of my contemporaries. 16c1r Kevin.

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I've recently begun doing this, too.  Sometimes it makes me feel crazy to spend time researching the ex-husband of someone who is not related to me in the first place, and who never asked me to do so, but I think it'll be cool to see how it affects my connections (both in number and in closeness) in the long run.

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Now I can't quite figure out how both my husband (who is my 7th cousin) and my mother, both have quite a lot more than me.  My mom is well over a 1000 and I still sit at a little over 900, and I do all the research lol

Answer 1

This is an ongoing debate. If you are lucky enough to have a 2nd or 3rd cousin who has a high cc7 you will be gifted with several connections once, you connect to them. Badges are like fuzzy dice, they are kind of fun, but they do not make your car any better or safer. My interest in a higher cc7 is to make more connections. I have specific goals in who I am trying to connect one to another. Their life stories can wait. I make some notes and will work on bios after I see who all I can connect. The only person I hope to please with any of this is me.

Comments

Badges are like fuzzy dice, they are kind of fun, but they do not make your car any better or safer.

Love this!!!

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I was going to use blue hair but, I didn't want to offend those a little older or a lot younger than me. Fuzzy dice seemed safe enough.

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Indeed, old debate older than the CC7 concept itself. When I introduced in WikiTree the "circles" metric, the idea was to have people look around any profile in all directions, not only upwards searching parents and ancestors, downwards searching descendants, but sideways through siblings, spouses, in-laws and collaterals, which is indeed often more efficient to find new connections.

When CC7 was introduced as a badge, I was reluctant, because indeed you can have a huge CC7 because your sister-in-law has been busy expanding hers.

But it's more than a fun fact, and Mark's question is a good one, provided no simple answer is thrown. CC7 is an indicator of the density of the network around you. That many people have reached a 4 or even 5 digits CC7 just shows that about anybody could/should reach similar values in the long run (mediocrity principle), and wondering how will push you to explore new lateral paths, and discover surprising connections.

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Oh, Bernard, please don't think I was implying increasing one's CC7 is frivolous. (I don't think that is what K. Smith was saying either.) I often use CC7 levels to expand my genealogical circle and provide focus for my research. It is the badge for increasing one's CC7 which is fun, but not essential. My pace of increasing my CC7 is much slower than some others, but it is definitely increasing. Since CC7 was introduced about 11 months ago mine has increased by about 823 (not including any since the report was published on Tuesday.) I feel pretty good about that but I also know and understand CC7 count number and the increase of it is controlled by more variables than just my own profile creation and/or connection-making.

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Nelda, no problem. I think we are on the same page.

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Sorry,

A little late with my response, and thanks for the good input from all the replies. I can see the value or how you can enhance WT "one tree" concept with connection badges. And yes, I understand what "connections" are. My focus is different, (not necessarily better). But yes, I could cut and paste a couple thousand well sourced profiles from my Ancestry tree, or even use FS to accomplish the same. However I see many orphaned profiles, unsourced, and undersourced profiles that need work. If the focus is to get my badge 1000, 2000 badge etc, gets in the way of actually creating good profiles (or even making small corrections to existing ones), will the quality go down? That's a concern for me. I very often see "This profile needs sources", or profiles with simply a ref. to FindAGrave. Sometimes it's a profile that has errors and the PM hasn't made a contribution for five years. WT has always emphasized the importance of good sourcing. It's fundamental to WT's quality. I am not (repeat not), attempting to minimize the connections badge, but focusing on the impression newbies may have if they see a plethora of quickly put together single sourced profiles left for others to complete. Again, no offense or judgement on my part, only slight concern. In general, I don't see any other site on the internet that does as much as WT does (in terms of completeness and innovation). It is good that we can agree to disagree and yet be polite about it.

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Agreed- prominently featuring that number and gently promoting its expansion has the nice side effect (for Wikitree as a site, especially) of giving people a reason to add a bunch of people to the universal family tree that otherwise would get left out because nobody active here has any special interest in them.

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K Smith

Wow, I missed my emails due to my rules set in my email client. That being said...no blue hair, but the lava lamp and magic eight ball will soon be on e-bay. Watch soon for a good sale. Sorry, the fuzzy dice are in my last will and testament to my ex.

Answer 2

Your contributions represent almost everything you have done on Wikitree, including asking this question. Click on the contribution link to see more.

Your connections, including CC7, is the profiles you have created or connected to.

Not sure if I have answered your question but I hope that helps.

Comments

More info here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Connection_Counts

Answer 3

Hi

 Your CC7 figure is not necessarily changed by profiles you add, nor your contributions to profiles.
 I see my CC7 figures go up and sometimes down as profiles within 7 degrees are connected, or disconnected. For example my ex-wife is 1 degree from me, if anyone connects a profile within 6 degrees of her, my CC7 goes up. Ditto for aunts and uncles by marriage, any addition within 5 degrees of them, and so on for other connections.

 A CC7 badge is not a earned badge like a contribution badge.

 The goal of CC7 seems to be to encourage people to expand family networks, rather than just adding their genetic family.

I've found it useful, a number of in-laws have actually turned out to be cousins of some degree, when I expanded out to CC7 limits.

Answer 4

The numbers below are how far they are from you.

your parents are 1 : aunts and uncles are 2 (or 3 for spouses)
your grand parents are 2 : grand aunts and uncles are 3 (or 4 for spouses)
your great grand parents are 3 : great grand aunts and uncles are 4 (or 5 for spouses)

CC7 only counts how many are on your tree up to 7 away.

Maybe you did not add the childern of your great grand parents but someone else did, your CC7 would go up.

If your father married twice that is counted as 3 your parents and the other wife and if she got married again now your CC7 is 4 only if they are all on your tree.

Comments

Actually parents, spouse and kids are 1.

Answer 5

Your CC7 connections are based on how many profiles you are connected to on Wikitree within 7 degrees whether it was you who created those profiles or not. So if someone joins Wikitree and connects themselves to someone with thousands of connections they would immediately have thousands of connections with having made very few contributions themselves.

Answer 6

Some people are lucky enough to quickly connect to pre-existing branches, and that counts for the CC7. I agree it's not an achievement though, and shouldn't be celebrated with a badge. I don't think there is a single profile within 7 degrees of me (or even something like 12~15 degrees) that I didn't create myself...

Answer 7

I don't think that the CC7 number should be regarded as an achievement, but rather a "fun fact". A high CC7 number will mostly be dependent of the collective work of a group of members working within the same area. You can easily see that the highest CC7 scores are clustered within certain countries, like USA and South Africa. For those of us working in other parts of the world, the chances of gaining a high CC7 score are much lower.

For my own part, I've created about 26,000 profiles, but have a CC7 number of 1,345. That is because I'm working with the entire population of a few neighbouring parishes, mostly before 1800, and because there are few others who have done significant work in the same area.

Answer 8

You can put together a profile fairly quickly if you gather the info you need. I just added one to your cc7 in under 10 minutes, and the man had a wife and three kids you could add to increase it by four more.  

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Bloodgood-168

I've been working on my own cc7 in the same manner and have increased it by over 200 in just a few days of on and off work. 

You don't have to just add a single source in a few minutes; you can add lots of sources in just a few minutes. 

Comments

"you can add lots of sources in just a few minutes."

Not sure how you do that? It depends in which space time area you work, and which tools you use. If you are in the US and use FS and related tools, yes you can. If you work like me with French departements archives to get primary sources, each one needs to go to the archive, find the page, copy the link, format the bio. When I can add ten profiles a day this way, I'm happy.

Maybe I could go through FS or Ancestry or whatever. But I just don't want, being French in France, with public archives online, to depend on tools done overseas by a private company.

It's a bit like you want to eat local food if you can. Local food having traveled back on forth on thousands of miles is no more local food.

Answer 9

The way I look at it (joking) is that to get to my next CC7 badge, I can either add to my tree (for probably 3 years), or I can marry somebody named LaPlante (or somebody similarly situated, CC7-wise).

Well, Mr. LaPlante might not be OK with that (although I haven't asked), Mrs. LaPlante might not be OK with that (definitely haven't asked!), and I THINK Mrs. Stanley (completely unwitting about the idea) wouldn't be OK with that, so I think I'll stick with Plan A - just adding a bunch of people to my tree, and taking forever.

Actually, if I wanted to go faster (than Plan A), I'd focus on adding trees of in-laws, and hope that somebody out there has already done a lot that I can connect to.

But it's just a spiffy badge. I'm not going to get married, or add people to my tree that I'm not related to, in order to get it. (Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up!  )

Yet my silliness kind of gets across, I hope, that these badges CAN represent a significant expansion of your tree, but it can also represent practically no work at all. In fact, I think someone once pointed out that some of the highest CC7 count people are actually deceased!

Some badges should be taken more seriously than others. They can represent achievement, but they can also be more about fun and motivation. Seems like a lot of people have been motivated to expand the One Tree because of its introduction.