Remember that I am on the side of adding more profiles to WikiTree as quickly as possible, because the task is enormous, and even 36,990,642 profiles, as awesome an achievement as it is, still only represents about one profile for every 1,712 people born since 1 A.D. (Or, to put it another way, we are about 0.058% done, just in terms of adding profiles, never mind getting them up to any kind of a standard.1) It took me forever to connect my family to the main tree, and I very nearly gave up before finally finding a connection. I don't want other people to be discouraged and drop out because it takes them so long to connect to our main tree because it's so small. (And, yes, compared to this month's estimate of 63,345,754,172 people born since 1 A.D., yes, a tree with 36,990,642 profiles does count as "small".) That's why I've suggested so many different kinds of thons and other challenges. As far as I'm concerned, anything that motivates people to create new profiles is a good thing.
All of that said, there are people who don't like thons or challenges of any kind, because their perception is that participants will do the minimum necessary on each profile to get a "point", because they care more about racking up points than about improving the tree. Now, I don't know what anybody besides me is thinking when they're working on a profile (actually, sometimes, I'm not even so sure about what I'm thinking...), but I assume that, for most people who are participating in the various thons and other challenges, that's not true.2
So what I was attempting to do was adress that criticism of thons by having the rules of thons be that any new profile created through a thon is going to start out being better than most of the profiles that are already on WikiTree. If that were the case, then the criticism that thons lower the average quality of profiles on WikiTree would, clearly, be invalid.
And also remember that I'm talking about the rules of thons, not of WikiTree as a whole. If we made the rules for adding any profile to WikiTree as strict as what I suggest for thons, then we'd make it pretty much impossible to add a profile in, say, British Columbia for anybody who was born after 1903, was married after 1947, or died after 2002.
Still, for what I consider the "golden age" of genealogy (from the time when things like census records have been kept until privacy protections kick in), there are hundreds of millions of people who could be documented to the levels I suggest. That doesn't mean that people who aren't as well documented should never be added to WikiTree, but for me, thons should concentrate on the low-hanging fruit.
Greg
- And that, in itself, is a huge improvement from March of 2016, when the total profiles on WikiTree represented approximately 0.016% of the people born since 1 A.D. But I do long for the day when we actually break 1%.
- In my case, when I'm working on surnames each month, I'll sort the profiles by the last edit date and look through the Open profiles to see whether they're sourced, add sources if I can, and add the {{Unsourced}} template if I can't. But because for most surnames I'm still back around 2010-2012, most of the profiles I check don't even have == Biography ==, == Sources ==, <references /> or even a bare-bones biography. So I end up doing a lot of fixing up on most profiles, even if I only find one source. And if I do find a source that names other family members (I particularly love census records for that), I look to see if I can find those other family members on WikiTree and link the profiles. Granted, I'm probably more on the obsessive end of the scale, but I do think the assumption that anybody doing a challenge is going to do the bare minimum and move on is unfair.