Heinrich Magnus Manske (born 24 May 1974) is a senior staff scientist at the

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust. It is located on the Wellcome G ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, UK and a

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, Computer programming, programming, software documentation, documenting, software testing, testing, and Software bugs, bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applic ...

of one of the first versions of the

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...

software, which powers

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

and a number of other websites.

Early life

Manske was born in

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 m ...

, Germany. He studied biochemistry at the

University of Cologne The University of Cologne (german: Universität zu Köln) is a university in Cologne, Germany. It was established in the year 1388 and is one of the most prestigious and research intensive universities in Germany. It was the sixth university to ...

and graduated in 2006 with a PhD; his dissertation was an open source tool for

molecular biology Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions. The study of chemical and physi ...

called GENtle.

Career

As a student, Manske was one of the first contributors to the Internet encyclopedia

Nupedia Nupedia was an English-language, online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by ...

, the precursor to

, and later wrote one of the first versions of the MediaWiki software that Wikipedia runs on. Manske has worked in

with the

since April 2007, but remains active in the development of tools for Wikipedia and its sister projects

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license. ...

and

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...

. In 2012, Manske was co-author of a paper published in ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

'' that demonstrated new ways to identify areas where malaria parasites are evolving, and described techniques for mapping malarial drug resistance. The researchers developed a technique to extract the malaria parasite DNA directly from the blood, which minimizes errors in sequencing.

Development of MediaWiki

As a student, Manske was one of the most active contributors to the

project, submitting content on biology topics and developing tools and extensions for Nupedia. Later, unhappy with the existing software's limitations, Manske developed one of the first versions of what later became

. His new version of the software was installed in 2002. The wiki software that was initially used for

was called

UseModWiki UseModWiki is a wiki software written in Perl and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Wikipedias in English and many other languages were powered by Use ...

and was written in

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

. With issues of scale starting to present themselves as Wikipedia grew, in the summer of 2001, Manske started work on a replacement for UseModWiki that would be database-backed and would contain "wikipedia-specific features". On 25 January 2002, Manske released the first version of a

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

-based

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

wiki engine, called ''Phase II''. One innovation implemented by Manske in Phase II was the use of namespaces in order to separate different types of pages, such as the "Talk" or "User" namespace, which distinguished it from older wiki software which didn't have different namespaces. Phase II also introduced a number of other features which are still present, including file upload, watchlists, automatic signatures, and user contributions list. Manske's re-write also made it easier to integrate photographs in Wikipedia articles, and created a new user group: administrators, empowered to delete pages and block vandals. Manske was an adherent of open source and specifically, the

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

license, and his work on the early versions of MediaWiki was released under the GPL license. Manske's Phase II software encountered load issues as Wikipedia continued to grow, so

Lee Daniel Crocker Lee Daniel Crocker (born July 3, 1963) is an American computer programmer. He is best known for rewriting the software upon which Wikipedia runs, to address scalability problems. This software, originally known as "Phase III", went live in July ...

did another re-write, which led to phase III, which was used from June 2002 and from 2003 onwards was called "MediaWiki". The resultant

software is now used as the core platform for both Wikipedia and many

Wikimedia The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

sister projects, as well as in many organizations and institutions. Manske continued to develop extensions for MediaWiki and tools used to build Wikipedia and its sister projects, including tools to map category membership, compute category intersections, and import images from

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...

Commons The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons ...

. Manske also developed the Cite extension which brought an XML-like syntax to citation management.

Recognition

Manske is recognized as the creator of the first article in the German Wikipedia, which was on the

polymerase chain reaction The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a method widely used to rapidly make millions to billions of copies (complete or partial) of a specific DNA sample, allowing scientists to take a very small sample of DNA and amplify it (or a part of it) t ...

, first written by him in 2001.

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedi ...

in 2002 named 25 January as Magnus Manske day in honor of his contributions to Wikipedia, proclaiming that "Tonight at dinner, every Wikipedian should say a toast to Magnus and his many inventions."

Larry Sanger Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...

, in his memoir on the early history of Wikipedia, highlighted the contributions of Manske to the project and attributes the eventual success of Wikipedia to a core group of actors, with Manske playing a role: Manske, along with others, was recognized as a major contributor to MediaWiki by the USENIX Advanced Computing Technical Association in 2010 when MediaWiki and the Wikimedia Foundation were honoured with a STUG award (Software Tools User Group).

References

External links