Question about Unsourced profiles without the category for the Source-a-Thon

Question

Hi, quick question.  I am aware that only unsourced profiles that have the category template on them are supposed to count towards the source-a-thon stats.

There are many, many more profiles that do not have this category on them yet are in dire need of sources - is there a way to have these included as well for the purposes of the competition?

For eg, if I discover one of these profiles on Saturday, should I add the "unsourced" template to the profile first (so it technically becomes part of the unsourced category) and then add my sources?  Or should I just add the template and wait for someone else to do the research as part of the competition?

I know the primary goal is to clean out the unsourced categories so if this is a bad idea or not in the spirit of the source-a-thon please advise.  In the meantime I have been adding the template as much as possible today to loads of profiles so they are in scope when the source-a-thon kicks off.  

Leigh

Comments

My vote would say "fair" to do that today and "unfair" to do it tomorrow.  Maybe there could be an "add unsourced category-a-thon" sometime in the future!  :D

---

I have found this a lot. I've probably sourced 30+ uncategorized profiles this weekend. I didn't include them in my total, but just think how many more profiles now have sourcing, even more than we originally thought. The ones that have given me to most trouble are the small children, they probably died between censuses, and are far enough back that a birth certificate or register may not be in existence. I keep looking for these on my watch list, but we may never be able to find hard sources for some of them.

Answer 1

Good question, Leigh.

It doesn't make sense to add the Unsourced template, save it, and then find the sources and remove it. (This is trivial, but extra saves do add unnecessary clutter to our database.)

The reason we say qualifying profiles should come from the Unsourced category is because we don't want people adding new unsourced profiles and then sourcing them. As long as you're not doing that, I think it's all good. :-)

See you this weekend!

Comments

Thanks Chris - I am definitely not doing that!!!  :-)

---

Nor I.

Answer 2

Well, we have over 200,000 unsourced profiles to work on by say 700 genealogists or an average of 300 each.  I'm sure there will be a few who willl do more than that, but I expect most willl do less than 100.  Of course many will be hard to do So I'd wory more about finding good sources today for a state or country you're interested in  and come up with a plan for the weekend. If we run out of profiles to work on, I say that's victory. I know there's less than 300 unsourced in the Ohio list, but I don't know just how many will actually want to make that their first choice to work on, but it will be mine.

Comments

The snag is that large numbers of those are not just unsourced, they are unsourceable.

---

maybe a separate category is needed to identify the unsourceable