Magnus Manske

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Magnus Manske 2015

Heinrich Magnus Manske (* 1974 in Cologne ) is a German biochemist . In 2002 he wrote the first version of the MediaWiki software that operates Wikipedia.

Life

From 1984 to 1993 Magnus Manske attended the Hölderlin-Gymnasium in Cologne. He completed his biochemistry studies at the University of Cologne in 2006 with a dissertation entitled “GENtle, a Free Multi-purpose Molecular Biology Tool”.

Manske has been with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge since April 2007 . In 2012, he was co-author of a paper published in Nature on new methods for identifying changing sequences in the genome of malaria parasites and on new techniques for mapping the drug resistance of malaria. To do this, his research group had developed a method to extract the DNA of the malaria parasite directly from a blood sample, which reduces the errors in sequencing.

Commitment to the Wikimedia projects

In 2001, Manske was one of the first and most active authors of Wikipedia's predecessor Nupedia. He mainly contributed to biological topics and developed individual software tools for Nupedia. He also wrote the earliest article on German Wikipedia, the entry " Polymerase chain reaction ".

As a student, Manske developed the first version of the wiki software, later called MediaWiki , especially for Wikipedia , when the UseModWiki engine previously used, written in Perl , was not up to the requirements. In 2002 the first version, a MySQL -based PHP application called "Phase II" at the time , was used for the first time. This version contained a number of new functions that are standard in wiki software today, such as namespaces, watch lists and contribution lists. He also simplified the integration of photos and created a new user group, the administrators, can delete the pages and block disturbers.

Lee Daniel Crocker in particular revised Manske's software in 2002, which led to the improved version and new version called "Phase III", which was used from June 2002 and from 2003 was called "MediaWiki". The software is now also used in the Wikimedia sister projects and in numerous organizations, companies and institutions. Manske is still active as a volunteer programmer for the Wikimedia projects. He created tools to display the classification of articles in categories and to import photos from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons, as well as an extension to make it easier to insert individual references. For Wikidata he developed the tools “AutoList” and “Mix'n'match” as well as the list-generating bot “Listeria”, the “Wikidata Game” and other tools.

Honors

In view of his services to the MediaWiki software, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales declared January 25th to be “Magnus Manske Day”: “Wikipedians of the distant future will marvel at the day when the new software era dawned upon us. Tonight at dinner, every Wikipedian should say a toast to Magnus and his many inventions. ”( In the distant future, Wikipedians will look back on the day when the new software era dawned. Today every Wikipedian should have dinner on Magnus and his many inventions toast. )

In 2010, the USENIX Advanced Computing Technical Association mentioned Manske's role in the development of MediaWiki in recognizing the MediaWiki Project and the Wikimedia Foundation with the Software Tools User Group Award. In 2014 he and Lydia Pintscher accepted the Open Data Publisher Award of the Open Data Institute from Tim Berners-Lee on behalf of the Wikidata project .

Publications (selection)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Magnus Manske (2006): GENtle, a free multi-purpose molecular biology tool , dissertation, University of Cologne.
  2. ↑ Magnus Manske et al. a .: Analysis of Plasmodium falciparum diversity in natural infections by deep sequencing . Nature 487 (2012), pp. 375-379.
  3. ↑ Magnus' tools on wmflabs , 2018 (English).
  4. ↑ Magnus Manske: Outwitted . The Whelming, May 6, 2015
  5. ↑ Magnus Manske: The Game Is On . The Whelming, May 20, 2014
  6. ↑ Wikidata: External Tools.
  7. ^ Jimmy Wales: Celebration . Wikipedia-1, January 25, 2002.
  8. ↑ Darren Logan: Why Malaria's Magnus is celebrated by Wales' Wikipedia Day , Sanger Institute , January 25, 2013.
  9. ↑ USENIX: STUG award .
  10. ^ First ODI Open Data Awards presented by Sirs Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt. In: ODI News. Open Data Institute, November 4, 2014, accessed on October 2, 2017 (English, picture proof).

Web links

Commons : Magnus Manske  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Manske, Magnus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Manske, Heinrich Magnus (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German biologist and software developer
DATE OF BIRTH 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne