User:RayKiddy

ray at gany remove this extra info mede.org

I work in software, on large database information systems. My wife and I collect books of and about Lewis Carroll and she was editor of the Knight Letter, the magazine of the LCSNA, and I edited the book reviews. We also collect modern mystery/adventure (Dick Francis, Nelson DeMille, Lee Child, &c), science fiction (Ray Bradbury, David Brin, &c) and a few other things.

Wikipedia seems to be a good medium for storing semi-structured information. Databases are not for everything, but loose narrative text is not for everything either. It would be good to be able to use database-oriented tools to analyze the structured parts of WP pages. It may make those parts of the pages more consistent.

To do:


 * Figure out proper citation styles for pages related to Lewis Carroll. They tend to be marked as lacking correct citations. One problem is that there are controversies about LC and some people seem to be both making a point and creating a brand for themselves. This seems to lead to citations which are not to original sources, or the more relevant sources.
 * I am interested in putting information about businesses on (see Standard Industrial Classification), but it is hard to know how to start. There is discussion on Companies, corporations and economic information.
 * I am not sure how to get started yet, but I think it should be possible to look at the infoboxes on wikipedia as structured information, ie databases. It would be useful to be able to use structured queries (yes, I mean SQL) to fetch against the infoboxes on various pages....
 * One can fetch a page that lists pages using a particular Template from the page for that Template. Score!
 * There is a lot of information in the series produced by the Historian of the United States: "Foreign Relations of the United States", known as FRUS. It is interesting that the entire list of titles in this series is not available anywhere.
 * The list of people appointed to the Supreme Court who were defeated in the nomination process is not immediately available from official sources, at least the obvious ones.
 * I would like to try to finish getting the data for the dependents' deductions and show amounts for each year if fully adjusted for inflation.
 * some more math stuff....
 * it would be good to add some more information to Immigration to the United States. For example, what was the make-up of the residents of the 13 colonies at the time of the Revolution? Then what were the origins of the different people who immigrated after that, and what was the reaction to each group?