Lee Daniel Crocker (born July 3, 1963) is an American computer programmer. He is best known for rewriting the

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

upon which

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 ...

runs, to address

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

problems. This software, originally known as "Phase III", went live in July 2002 and became the foundation of what is now called

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 MediaWi ...

. MediaWiki's code repository was still named "phase3" until the move from Subversion to

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

in March 2012. He is a co-author of the PNG specification, and was also involved in the creation of the GIF and JPEG image file formats. He invented the per-scanline variable pre-filtering compression method used by PNG, the sum-of-abs heuristic used by many encoding programs, and proposed an early version of the

Adam7 algorithm Adam7 is an interlacing algorithm for raster images, best known as the interlacing scheme optionally used in PNG images. An Adam7 interlaced image is broken into seven subimages, which are defined by replicating this 8×8 pattern across the ...

, using 5 passes rather than 7. In 1998, he was one of the 23 original creators of the "

Transhumanist Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition. Transhuma ...

Declaration". As of 1999, he was a member of the Extropians futurist society. In June 2010, Crocker and others won the USENIX Advanced Computing Technical Association STUG award for contributions to the Wikipedia software.

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*
''Information Week'' May 7, 2007: The Best Web Software Ever Written

* ttp://www.ddj.com/architect/184409587?pgno=4 Dr. Dobb's Journal #232 July 1995 (Vol 20, Issue 7), pp. 36–44: PNG: The Portable Network Graphic Format {{DEFAULTSORT:Crocker, Lee Daniel 1963 births Living people American transhumanists Extropians Free software programmers American software engineers American Wikimedians Wikipedia people

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