Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 December 9

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December 9

Robert William Chambers Descendents

Hello,

In your introduction to Robert William Chambers page you write.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers (1827–1911), a famous lawyer, and Caroline (Boughton) Chambers, a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, Rhode Island. Robert's brother was Walter Boughton Chambers, the world famous architect.

I can prove that the information is correct, except for his being a descendent of Roger Williams. I can find no evidence of this, anywhere. Caroline Boughton's Ancestry file only goes back to her father, there does no seem to be any records of this. Can you tell me where you got the information so I can document it? Robert was my great grand Uncle, which we means that I am also a descendent of Roger Williams. It does not mean a thing, but I would like to know.

Thank you for your time,

Suzanne Chambers Evans. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Suzannedelasalle (talk • contribs) 03:06, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

It's unfortunate that this is a rather poorly sourced article which doesn't reach Wikipedia's standards of reliability. I suggest you ask your question at Talk:Robert W. Chambers.

Roger Williams (theologian) died in 1687, three hundred and thirty years ago - and two hundred years before Robert Chambers was born. He had six children in his younger years - 350 years is about 18 generations. If each generation produced three offspring, then there are likely to be 6x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3 = 86,000,000 descendants. That means that about one person in every 3 Americans is likely to be a descendant of Roger Williams. SteveBaker (talk) 04:50, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

What? No. That back-of-the-envelope calculation is way off. Clarityfiend (talk) 09:15, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

It's probably off by an order of magnitude. He should have several million descendants today. By comparison, there are over 30 million descendants of the passengers of the Mayflower which was only one generation earlier than Roger Williams: [1]. To correct for a few things, if we assume 350 years and 25 years per generation, that's 14 generations. According to this simple calculator (which does Steve Baker's calculation for us), he should have about 7,000,000 descendants today, or roughly the population of New York City less the Bronx. --Jayron32 13:25, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Maybe, maybe not. Quite a few of those projected 7 million might be duplicates. As you track a tree backwards, often its nice and neat structure starts to break down. One obvious problem is first cousins marrying, thus some of the same people appear twice in the tree. Another is marrying distant relatives who are one generation different, chronologically. Then you not only have the same people appearing twice, they appear twice in multiple generations. Another question of how many of his six children bore children of their own or even lived that long. (These are the kinds of things you run into with family tree research.) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:45, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

True, but given the level of mobility in the U.S. the amount of pedigree collapse you note is likely to be minimal. Certainly, SOME of the people having children will be distant cousins, and occupy multiple places in the descendant tree. But not a huge number. Even if 1/2 of the people were duplicates (a HUGE number, and likely not even close to correct), that would only cut the number of living descendants down to 3.5 million. So we're now down to the population of Los Angeles. --Jayron32 14:38, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

There was not as much mobility in the olden days. Communities were small and close-knit, and families tended to intermarry frequently. Also, first cousins marrying was not at all uncommon. I concur that the pedigree collapse probability would be reduced in a more mobile society. And as you say, whether it's 3.5 million or 7 million, that's still a lot. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:28, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

If there are 30 million Mayflower descendents, then you'd have to take into account there were 102 passengers and the extra generation, which would result in a reduction by roughly 102*3, so about 100,000 Chamberses? Clarityfiend (talk) 02:37, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

No, the calculation for the descendants of a single person is pretty rudimentary. I'm not sure of the Mayflower Society's methodology, but the calculation for the descendants of Roger Williams is simple arithmetic, and the arithmetic gives us 7 million or so. One thing to keep in mind is that 102 passengers did NOT have children. Only 53 survived the first winter, and of that group, there was only 4 adult women. The calculation method of figuring out descendants is only useful when we lose track of the actual descendants. We have very good records of all of the Mayflower passengers and all of their immediate children, so the Mayflower Society's 30 million figure likely takes much of the actual known history into their calculations. However, we quickly lose track of many of the descendants of any one person after a few generations (especially someone 350 years ago), which is why we have to fall back on arithmetic instead of counting. For example, we know that Roger Williams had 6 kids, but we don't know much about their descendants, and so on. The 7 million is a very rough estimate; but good enough to let us know the number is within the millions somewhere. There's not likely to be an easily countable number of descendants, neither is there likely to be a billion of them. Something in the millions is reasonable and well expected. --Jayron32 03:41, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

A followup question could be a guesstimate of the number of Americans descended from two different historical individuals who didn't live particularly close to each other. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:17, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

The answer would be exactly double the number, presuming they were separated enough so that their descendant trees did not interweave. For the opposite case, for cases where individuals married each other, they would of course have the same identical set of descendants, so the same estimate for obvious reasons (which is probably part of the reason why the Mayflower descendant estimates come in lower than expected; besides the fact that a large number died without leaving any descendants, of those that survived the first winter, many married each other; several had been married before arrival: for example William Brewster and his wife Mary, who arrived with two children of their own (they also had several older children who did not make the trip), while some married other passengers after arriving: for example, Priscilla Mullins married John Alden, (well known from the Courtship of Miles Standish), and Elizabeth Tilley married John Howland (notably, the Tilley-Howland marriage is the source of a large proportion of the Mayflower descendants today, owing to their fecundity. They had 88 grandchildren). I'm fairly sure the Mayflower Society considers such known facts in their estimations... --Jayron32 13:21, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Your fundraising

In your appeal you listed 3 ways to Email you money. Do you not want checks? If you do accept checks - What is the Foundation's street address & ZIP in San Francisco? By the way - Why isn't the address anywhere to be found on your site? Or did I miss it?

Well anyway - keep up the good work.

JM Smith — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.0.197.35 (talk) 19:33, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

The addresses to send checks/cheques to are on https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give which is linked from Donate to Wikipedia on the left hand menu on every page. Nanonic (talk) 19:38, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Bear in mind that very little of what you might donate actually ends up improving Wikipedia directly. Check Wikipediocracy for their recurring complaints about that fact. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:54, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Bugs, can you please not undermine the continued existence of the very website you spend much of your life at. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:05, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

You need to read what they have to say. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:08, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

I've skimmed the site, and it seems their largest complaint is that monies raised by WikiMedia Foundation go to support infrastructure and not article development. They then suggest that money be donated directly to article writers, which goes against the spirit of WP, if not the letter of the law. WMF has never indicated that donations are used to improve articles, and if you click through the ads they talk about how WP is one of the most used websites in the world, and they need money to support infrastructure to allow that to happen while keeping the content free from advertisement. Anyway, the Wikipediocracy website seem like a lot of bad-faith axe grinding to me, and I agree that it seems off to repeatedly mention it on these pages. BTW, this is getting off-topic from the simple question that was asked, so I'm hatting it. If anyone else wants to continue this side discussion please move it to the talk page. SemanticMantis (talk) 22:12, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

It's only right that the OP inform himself about where his money would be going. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:14, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Regardless, what are you doing contributing here if you have serious issues with the disposition of donations? Either you're on the team or you're not. If you want to start some campaign to right what you see as some terrible wrong, fine, but here is not the place. You know that full well. Dissuading random OPs is no way to do it. That sort of behaviour is no better than what your famous "drive-by" trolls do. Have you jumped the fence? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:16, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

I consider Wikipedia to be a valuable resource. (My wife, by the way, thinks Wikipedia is worthless. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between.) But I don't care for a lot of the stuff that the guys at the top do, and until they institute some reforms, they'll never get one red cent of my money. And anyone contemplating donating money to any organization needs to inform himself of where the money's going. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:25, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

• I have re-opened this since it is simply wrong that the complaints are too much goes toward infrastructure. A whole 7% goes to server maintenance according to the article. I myself would have hatted the entire thread and left the user a message on his IP address telling him where he could send a check. But we shouldn't be hatting other's caveats (look at the mushroom article) just because we may hold a differing POV. μηδείς (talk) 22:52, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

  Well, that 7% goes towards the physical maintenance of the servers themselves (basically paying the electric bill to keep the power flowing through them, etc.) One also has to pay a fair wage to the people whose job it is to keep the servers running and fix them when they break. The WMF budget can be found here for the 2014-2015 fiscal year. The complaints Bugs notes above from Wikipediocracy are mostly uninformed about the sort of things that are necessary to keep a website of this nature running. Very real work, which requires actual full-time jobs, which need to be compensated with real cash, is needed to run Wikipedia behind the scenes. The structure that allows the volunteer editors to, you know, edit, requires a lot of behind the scenes work that the public doesn't see, or really even think about. I can use my own profession (public school teacher) as an example: In schools, teachers are the public face of the field, but there's probably at LEAST 2 other people employed by the school who no one ever sees (or thinks about) for every teacher in the classroom. Principals and assistant principals, guidance staff, cafeteria workers, janitors and custodial staff, maintenance, clerks, accountants, etc. Most people probably think of schools as mostly employing teachers, with a few extra people to do the odds and ends. In reality, while teachers are the main means by which the school does its job (deliver instruction to students), teachers COULD NOT do their job at all without a huge number of people doing lots of work that no one sees or thinks about. The WMF is no different in that regard: Wikipedia could not happen without the support that WMF provides, and that support needs people doing jobs for which they have a right to be paid, not even including the capital expenses and facilities and general "paying the bills" stuff. Now, that doesn't mean the WMF doesn't deserve some scrutiny, and it should have it, but the sense I get from Wikipediocracy and Bugs's criticisms is that they have a very unreal expectation of what it takes to keep Wikipedia going. The implication that its all waste is simply not true; might there be some small percentage of waste which could be better spent? Sure, every organization has some inefficiency problems. But the WMF is not holding coke orgies while rolling in piles of donor cash; they're doing all the very real work that is needed to keep the lights on around here. --Jayron32 13:40, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the clear explanation and refs! I guess I meant "infrastructure" in a more general sense, not to just include electricity and server uptime. Certainly human resources at WMF are necessary to support WP's mission. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:57, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps RDM isn't the best place for this discussion, but if we have links to Wikipediocracy, we ought to include some others which share similar views but aren't quite as agenda driven. El Reg: Wikipedia won't stop BEGGING for cash - despite sitting on $60m. WMF's annual report indicates reserves of $27.9 million cash and $23.3 million investments as of 30 June, 2014. At least the internet hosting, at $2.53 million, was more than their travel and conferences line item at $1.97 million, but compare that to the $4.02 million spent on fund-raising!

Yes, WMF needs funds to operate, but money can kill a project like this. Many highly experienced, prolific editors feel that the WMF has developed a Cathedral-like, top down approach to its projects, most recently exemplified by the issues with WP:VE and WP:FLOW. Most of them are not seeking payments for editors, but they feel that a significant reduction in donations would make WMF smaller and more responsive, and would be better for the projects. Stop giving Wikipedia money is just a blog post, but it expresses many of these ideas. -- ToE 02:17, 11 December 2014 (UTC) Edit" That last is a particularly poor addition. -- ToE 12:21, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Not saying some of those criticisms of the actions of WMF are not justified, but there is also some wisdom in keeping a large cash reserve/endowment for any organization. Expecting to meet your exact budget year-to-year, and keeping absolutely nothing in savings is a bad way to run any organization. WMF needn't spend every penny it takes in to be considered well run (on the contrary, that's a BAD way to run an organization), nor does the existence of a cash reserve mean that one needs to not collect any income for that year; otherwise one is likely to blow through the cash reserve, leaving one in a BAD situation. Having savings doesn't mean one needs to stop making money. Criticisms of how WMF is run need to be divorced from how WMF manages its finances; if one choose to not give to the WMF because one disagrees with the actions it takes, that is perfectly valid, but "they have money in savings so the don't need to make any more money this year" is NOT a valid reason not to give. I don't quit my job because I've saved up a good nest egg. WMF isn't any different; it still needs income regardless of its savings. --Jayron32 04:09, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

There may be good reasons not to give the WMF money, but I'm not sure a blogpost from someone apparently trying to advertise their own crown sourcing content creation site where they pay you is a good demonstration for that. Particularly since when I've come across the WMF donator adverts (when not logged in), I find them far less annoying then the 4 ads on that site which are forever there taking up screen realestate (two of which are at the right). The other funny thins is the blog says:

And one of the best ways to show respect is not to give out some crappy badges and pats on the back, but to give them money.

yet right below that it says:

We pay our writers $1 for each post they create. Writers also earn badges when they post about different topics.

So apparently they do think badges are useful even if it isn't the only thing they give.

Edit: Reading that blogpost more carefully, the fact that the writer doesn't really understand the problems on wikipedia well is even more evident. In particular:

Since then Wikipedia’s programming efforts have been a disaster. The Visual Editor (a tool that would allow WYSYWIG editing) was a failure. Editors still edit using tags and arcane code to create their edits.

It's true thet the Visual Editor tool launch was a bit of a disaster. One of the reasons was because of the feeling it was made public way too earlier when there were too many bugs. However the other reason was because many experiences prefer to use these "tags and arcane code" to "create their edits" and have said they would prefer it to even a far better visual editor.

Another thing "It doesn’t even go to the admins who help check the content." Um okay....

Meanwhile the author probably should do some work on their own site. I see a prominent "© Copyright Newslines 2014" on every page. What I can't find is their actual copyright policy instead just more advertising about earning $1 per post and on how bad wikipedia is "Unlike Wikipedia, which has 90% white, male writers, many of our writers are women and minorities". May be they tell you when you sign up, who knows, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would have no interest in signing up for a site which doesn't even tell me if I retain the copyright to my work or have any control over what newsline the private for profit company can do with it after. (Not everyone may like the the CC/GFDL dual licence, but at least it's clear how I'm licencing my work on wikipedia, I do retain the copyright, and it's not only the WMF but anyone who can reuse my work in any way provided they follow the licence terms. (A read of the authors other stories gives more laughs, e.g. the Google one which gives this [2] as an example of how much better they are than Google's search results.)

Nil Einne (talk) 06:00, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Points on blog post taken and agreed with. That was either absolutely not the link I had intended, or, perhaps more likely, I only skimmed it and read into it what I was looking for. My bad! That was lazy of me and I apologize for wasting your time with it. (I'm better at seeking facts than opinions.) I was particularly looking for (and clearly didn't find) something to balance the article the Register links to in which Sue Gardner is quoted, "I wonder whether it might make more sense for the movement to focus a larger amount of spending on direct financial support for individuals working in the projects". That really surprised me, and I think it would be a very bad idea.

WMF discusses the idea of an Endowment here, and one for the support of actual operating costs sounds like a very good idea. The point of the cash reserves and the small fraction of the overall donations that actually goes to essential operations is that it makes the "Help us keep the lights on" style donation requests appear disingenuous.

Perhaps I am still jaded by the VE fiasco and the flow threats. Markup is a smaller barrier to entry than often portrayed. Learning to mimic a wikilink is a much easier task than learning proper editing rules and culture such as WP:RS, WP:NPOV, WP:BRD, etc. If they can come up with an editor which truly helps marking up references without breaking things, that would be great. Make easy things easier, but not at the cost of making mediumly-difficult things impossible. But they tried to push a broken technology with the goal of inclusion but which required experienced editors to follow it around cleaning up after its mistakes, and then refused to stand down, even temporarily until they had fixed the problems. The hubris they displayed has had long lasting effects in the attitudes toward the foundation of many of our hardest working editors.

It is possible for a strong supporter of Wikipedia to believe that WMF would be better served by lower funding. This is not as a punishment for the forced VE introduction; that was just one example of the disconnect between foundation and project that some of us think is exacerbated by the current level of funding. -- ToE 12:21, 11 December 2014 (UTC)