I think this is ultimately going to be a policy and timing decision for WikiTree. Quite honestly, I think we're in uncharted territory as yet with full Y-chromosome sequencing...and the over-$500 price tag isn't dissuading too many people. I'm a member of the DF27 subclade project, and we're seeing five new Big Y uploads per week.
For me, quite honestly, the growth of the yDNA phylo tree over the past 12 months has been staggering. And we're even starting to see reclassifications much farther up the tree as a result. For example, I've been testing new SNPs as they've been determined stable and added to the tree. But the top several SNPs in my branch of the tree have remained unchanged for years. In May, they looked like this:
- R-M343
- R-L389
- R-P297
- R-M269
- R-L23
Then, less than four weeks later:
- R-M343
- R-L754 -- Presumed positive
- R-L389
- R-P297
- R-M269
- R-L23
I'm down another seven levels from L23, but I was never tested for L754...ergo the "presumed" part.
And frankly the notion of using haplogroup as a confirmation of close family relationship kinda bothers me. FTDNA says we're now at well over 55,000 SNPs identified for the Y-chromosome. A SNP shouldn't change with anything like the frequency of a palindromic STR, but the fact is that all these umpteen highly localized or novel SNPs that are being identified at a prolific rate have zero track record: they've been identified for weeks, not years. You can apply some predictive mutational models, but you can't really have any experimental certainty until the SNPs have been evaluated over a reasonable sample size. And a SNP that's been found unique to only one or two people--so far, anyway--isn't a reasonable sample size.
And the problem with SNPs and the phylogenetic tree is that everything is hierarchical. I can't test positive for M269 unless I'm also M343. So a hypothetical novel SNP today, call it R-XYZ, could prove to be more common than thought five years from now...or the opposite: even less common than thought, with the possible result that some men might be a solid STR match, but not be positive for R-XYZ.
Call me a Chromosomal Luddite. I've seen some folks tout newly identified SNPs as certainty of immediate paternal line proof. I'm just not sure I'm ready to buy into it yet.
Edited to add: Just to be clear, I don't represent WikiTree in any way. My quirky opinions are mine and mine alone. :-)
