The name ReadParse is taken from a subroutine in a Perl library that was commonly used in the mid-1990s.
I am a big fan of Wikipedia but my contributions have been few and I'm contributing more all the time. I've contributed a bit to the article on The Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps, whose [website] I have run since 1997. I also completed at least a skeleton of articles featuring each President of the Republic of Panama, by creating a Succession Template and implementing that template in each President's page, creating pages for each President that did not exist. That was a fun exercise and taught me a bit about how Wikipedia works technically.
There's still a lot of work to be done on that section, but I got it to the point that every President had their own page and was using the succession template. To ensure accuracy and save time, I used Perl against the List of Presidents of Panama to autogenerate the Wikipedia code for each President.
Oh, I was in the US Air Force for 5 years and I was stationed in Panama for three of those years. I met and married my wife in Panama and our first child was born there -- hence the interest in Panama.
Other recent contributions include...
- I created a stub article on the late, great Atlanta gorilla Willie_B.
- I added my microwave directions to the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner article, since Kraft saw fit to remove those directions when they came out with a more expensive microwave product called Easy Mac. My microwave directions rockĀ :)
- I changed the List of mayors of Atlanta to wiki table format and added a Party column, even though somebody later mentioned that City of Atlanta elections never include the party on the ballot, so technically those Mayors were not representing their parties -- well, if you can believe thatĀ :) It was a good point, though.
- I took the very good Drum Corps info box and made it a template, then included that template on The Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps page
- I created a page for the Rockwood Municipal Airport, since I'm from Rockwood.
- When Senator Reid called for a rare closed session of the Senate, I sought out just how rare these were, starting first at Wikipedia, of course. Finding no information on Wikipedia, I researched it and wiki'd up a table of the previous 53 times this has happened since 1929. By the next morning, that brand new page was used on the In the News template on the Main Page.