Project: Collaborative Profile of the Week

Categories: Profile of the Week

The Collaborative Profile of the Week Project is no longer active. It ran from January 2015 through December 2016.

This project has been replaced by the Example Profile of the Week (see the Examples Gallery) and the 52 Ancestors profile sharing challenge.

See Category:Collaborative_Profile_of_the_Week for the outstanding profiles that were improved.

Contents

Mission

The mission of the Collaborative Profile of the Week is to develop a set of examples of the best collaborative WikiTree profiles. List of previously featured profiles.

We do this by selecting and collaboratively improving upon one profile per week.

Membership

We invite all WikiTree members to collaborate on the profile of the week, whether or not they're part of the project.

See the badge page for the current list of members.

Join the project

To join, simply:

  1. Ask AnneB to add the project badge to your profile.
  2. Add profile_of_the_week to your list of followed tags.

You can contact the Project Leader Anne B or communicate with all project members with a post tagged profile_of_the_week in G2G.

Operations

Each WikiTree project and sub-project has been assigned a week when they are responsible for choosing a profile to be collaborated on. Sometimes the project manager chooses. Sometimes they will consult with other project members.

Monday morning the current Collaborative Profile of the Week is announced and collaboration begins in G2G.

The following Monday we start promoting the profile that was collaborated on last week on the home page, social media, etc.

Here is more information about each of these three stages.

Selection of the Profile

To be selected for Collaborative Profile of the Week, a profile must be Open.

Our goal is to select profiles that are capable of becoming great profiles.

The profiles don't have to be great when they're selected. In fact, it's better if there is room for improvement.

Before it is selected we do need to know that a profile can be great. Sadly, some of our ancestors lived and died without much being recorded. There have to be sources we can discover so there is information we can add.

Moreover, the sources should be online. We only have a week to improve on the profile before it's featured. This means many modern profiles couldn't be selected, unless the person is famous or the family has already collected the basic information and it just needs to be cleaned-up.


Collaboration on the Profile

The goal of the week's collaboration is to make the profile the best it can be.

A secondary goal is to involve lots of WikiTree members in the process. We want the Collaborative Profile of the Week to showcase what is possible when genealogists work together. We also want it to be something fun for the community.

There's no shortage of ways to contribute. Here are things that a member can volunteer to help with:

  • Biography. In addition to adding content, members might volunteer to:
    • Improve the writing style.
    • Copy edit and make style and formatting improvements.
    • Confirm that text isn't copied and quotes are cited properly.
  • Sources. People need to find and add them, of course. Someone else could help just by improving the format of footnotes and sources, Elizabeth Shown Mills style.
  • Relationships. People can contribute to more than just the profile itself. Members can work on the profile's nuclear relatives and their family tree. Some might do this with an eye toward connecting them to AJ Jacobs or to another special project.
  • Images. Someone can volunteer to search for related photos and source images. In some cases, there may be a need to edit and optimize scanned images by someone who's experienced with image editing software.
  • Memories. Someone should seek out first-person stories that relate to the person and they should be posted in the Memories section.
  • Timeline. Someone might convert the person's life events into a timeline to show how that can be done.
  • Translations. A biography can be written in multiple languages. This is especially important if the person wasn't a native English speaker. Someone could offer to translate important parts of the biography and sources, or if they don't speak the language, they could offer to look for someone who could do it. There are many untapped Language Volunteers who just need to be asked.
  • Categories. Categories are under-utilized on many profiles. An experienced member of the Categorization project can generally do a lot to improve a profile's categorization.
  • Templates are another thing that can be complex to implement well. It may only take a few minutes for an experienced user of templates to add them.
  • DNA. Consideration by DNA project members can be given to whether relevant DNA information has been added correctly and whether any test-takers can be sought.
  • Matches and merges. Someone can volunteer to ensure that there are no duplicates and that anyone with a close name and the same dates is set as a rejected match.

G2G should be used for the collaboration.

To announce the Collaborative Profile of the Week and start the process, a question like this should be asked in the Requests for Volunteers category and tagged with the profile ID. Examples:

Everyone who wants to contribute should add an answer or comment saying what they plan to do — so someone else doesn't do it at the same time. If it's a small, quick addition they could just say they've done it.

Project members can help keep the discussion going by asking if someone will volunteer to do something specific, thanking people for their contributions, voting up answers, etc. This activity will help keep the question at the top of G2G for the week, thereby attracting attention.

Promotion of the Profile

After the week of collaboration, the Profile of the Week gets special attention.

It is featured on the main WikiTree home page for a week.

It is highlighted in WikiTree's Facebook account, Google+ group, Twitter feed, etc.

It's categorized as an example profile, for WikiTree members to emulate. Category: Collaborative Profile of the Week

We also ask project members to help spread the word about it. For example, by sharing the announcement of the winner in their own Social Media accounts.




This page was last modified 00:26, 12 September 2021. This page has been accessed 8,893 times.