Heinrich Magnus Manske (born 24May 1974) is a German

biochemist Biochemists are scientists who are trained in biochemistry. They study chemical processes and chemical transformations in living organisms. Biochemists study DNA, proteins and Cell (biology), cell parts. The word "biochemist" is a portmanteau of ...

who is a leading researcher on

malaria Malaria is a Mosquito-borne disease, mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects vertebrates and ''Anopheles'' mosquitoes. Human malaria causes Signs and symptoms, symptoms that typically include fever, Fatigue (medical), fatigue, vomitin ...

. He is a senior staff scientist at the

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

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

, UK and a

software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

of one of the first versions of the

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

software, which powers

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

and a number of other

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

-based websites.

Early life

Magnus Manske was born on 24May 1974 in

Cologne Cologne ( ; ; ) is the largest city of the States of Germany, German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city pr ...

, Germany. He studied biochemistry at the

University of Cologne The University of Cologne () is a university in Cologne, Germany. It was established in 1388. It closed in 1798 before being re-established in 1919. It is now one of the largest universities in Germany with around 45,187 students. The Universit ...

and graduated in 2006 with a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

; his dissertation was an open source tool for

molecular biology Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecule, molecular basis of biological activity in and between Cell (biology), cells, including biomolecule, biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactio ...

called GENtle.

Career

As a student, Manske was one of the first contributors to the Internet encyclopedia Nupedia, the precursor to Wikipedia, 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, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...

and

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons, or simply Commons, is a wiki-based Digital library, media repository of Open content, free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used ...

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

Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...

'' 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 Nupedia 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 Wikipedia was called UseModWiki and was written in

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

. 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 software, 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 rel ...

-based PHP 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 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 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 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 image hosting service, image and Online video platform, 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 previously a co ...

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.

Tools

As well as working on MediaWiki itself, Manske has made tools that work with it such as "wiki shoot me" that identifies on a map photos that are needed to be taken and allow them to be uploaded or Reasonator that take the raw information from Wikidata and presents it as if it were a Wikipedia article.

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 make millions to billions of copies of a specific DNA sample rapidly, allowing scientists to amplify a very small sample of DNA (or a part of it) sufficiently to enable detailed st ...

, first written by him in 2001.

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...

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 Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, ...

, 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 USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

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

* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Manske, Magnus 1974 births German bioinformaticians Free software programmers German biochemists German computer programmers Living people Scientists from Cologne University of Cologne alumni Wikipedia people German Wikimedians German expatriates in the United Kingdom