Do you ever use Wikipedia for your Hertfordshire Research?

If you visit Genealogy in Hertfordshire regularly you will know that I frequently include links to the Wikipedia web site - and if you use Wikipedia you may have found some of the 200+ links from Wikipedia to my site.. 

I started the Genealogy in Hertfordshire web site at about the same time that Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia and originally Wikipedia contained very little about Hertfordshire - but with teams of enthusiastic helpers it now contains an enormous amount of information about Hertfordshire towns and villages as they are in the 21st century - and also much valuable historical information. However there is a problem, as the following message from Jimmy Wales indicated.

To all our readers in the UK,

We will get straight to the point: Today we ask you to help Wikipedia. To maintain our independence, we will never run ads. We depend on donations averaging about £10. Only a tiny portion of our readers give. If everyone reading this gave £2, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. The price of a coffee is all we need. When I made Wikipedia a non-profit, people warned me I’d regret it. Over a decade later, it’s the only top ten site run by a non-profit and a community of volunteers. Has it crossed my mind how much we could have made if it had ads? Sure. But it wouldn’t be the same. We wouldn’t be able to trust it. Most people ignore my messages. But I hope you’ll think about how useful it is to have unlimited access to reliable, neutral information. Please help keep Wikipedia online and growing. Thank you. — Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Founder

I know exactly how Jimmy is feeling - as Genealogy in Hertfordshire has always been a non-profit site, with no adverts, and it also asks people who find the site useful to make donations.

The big difference is that the donations to Wikipedia are to pay the expenses of running what is a very large web site used millions of times a day, and it needs money to keep the site going. Donations to Genealogy in Hertfordshire all go to a Hertfordshire Mental Heath project in memory of my daughjters Lucy and Belinda. The basic computer costs of running the site are independently covered because it is one of a number of community projects run by HertsWeb while the costs of building the reference library of books, post cards, CDs, subscriptions, etc. used for answering questions, etc., all come out of my personal pension.

Donate to Wikipedia

Support the Mentally Ill in Hertfordshire

The big similarity is both sites have large numbers of visitors who greatly value the information they contain and expect the sites to continue for free for ever. May I suggest that if you have never made a donation to support Wikipedia, or to support Genealogy in Hertfordshire's nominated charity, now is the time to do it.    

How "Genealogy in Hertordshire" is raising money for the mentally ill of Hertfordshire

Lucy (1964-1985)

The Genealogy in Hertfordshire web site is a very popular one which provides a free online service and raises money for the mentally ill in Hertfordshire in memory of my daughters Lucy and Belinda. The software and computer that support the site is showing its age. In planning the site's future it is appropriate to ask how effective it has been in raising money for charity and so I have been looking at the relevant statistics.

Belinda (1966-2001)

In the first nine month of 2016 the site had just over 1 million visits but 90% are the typical quick in/out visits, suggested by search engines like google, where many visitors sees the page and decides to move on in less than a minute.

I have decided that only serious visitors matter - and to be serious a visit needs to trigger at least 6 page requests and/or stay connected for more than 5 minutes. Over nine months nearly 27,000 visitors have made more than 6 page requests (about 100 a day) and about 4 visitors a day are sufficiently interested in exploring the site to make more than 100 page requests. In total over 100,000 visitors spent more than 5 minutes on the site and nearly 10,000 have spent more than a hour exploring the site. In addition (using a different statistical package) over 50,000 accesses to this Newletter blog average out at about 200 a day.

The Hertfordshire Mind Network

So with all this activity how successful has the site been at raising money for charity. In fact donations this year are far lower than previously and the total to date is only £111. Spread over the 100,000 serious visitors this works out at the very ungenerous 0.1 penny per visit. If one widens the calculation every £1 donation "costs" about 10 hours of my time (including support activities where the answer does not appear directly online) and at least £10 expenditure (from my pension) goes on computer resources, subscriptions, and ebay purchases to support the library of pictures and books that support the web site. With this level of collective dis-interest I wonder if it is worth continuing the effort.

Donate Here

If you have found this site and my help and advice useful please say thank you, and cheer me up,  by making an online donation to the Herts Mind Network to help the mentally ill of Hertfordshire in time for Christmas.

XMAS Challenge 2: Schoolchildren at Watford? circa 1910

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Xmas 2014 Challenge

XMAS Challenge 1: A group of soldiers and civilians in St Albans(?) circa 1915

Xmas 2014 Challenge

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Herts Mind Network AGM - Watford 4th June

Herts Mind Network

This web site raises money for the Herts Mind Network, which provides community based support for people with mental health problems in Hertfordshire. Last year their annual report (to September 2011) said:

Although funding was cut, HMN maintained its services by looking at alternative ways of providing those services and as a result were able meet those funding cuts.

The HMN Board closely monitors the finances of HMN and is a standing item on the monthly Board meetings. 2011/12 will be a difficult year although we believe there will be plenty of opportunities for HMN to tender either on its own or in partnership with other organisations to maintain and enhance its current level of service delivery.

The AGM will consider the report for 2012/13 - which has been a difficult time for everyone, and there will undoubtedly be questions about the impact of benefit claim changes on people who are too ill to work out what is happening for themselves. In addition many more people are having difficulties because of the economic situation - and some are becoming mentally ill because of the extra stress coping with life on an uncertain income.Clearly the charity is planning to meet the extra demand and their web site is currently recruiting staff to support the mentally ill who are having difficulties managing their budgets. 

Donate Here

If you have found this site useful, and have not yet made a donation, please do so now, as at the AGM I don't want to have to report that so far this year we are over £300 behind target. 

I will report on what happens at the AGM.