thumb|240px|right|Lee Daniel Crocker at Internet Archive, 2008
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 2002 and became the foundation of what is now called
MediaWiki. MediaWiki's code repository was still named "phase3" until the move from
Subversion to
Git 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, using 5 passes rather than 7. In 1998, he was one of the 23 original creators of the "
Transhumanist 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.
See also
*
List of Wikipedia people
References
External links
*
''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
Category:1963 births
Category:Living people
Category:American transhumanists
Category:Extropians
Category:Free software programmers
Category:American software engineers
Category:American Wikimedians
Category:Wikipedia people