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Magnus Manske

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Heinrich Magnus Manske (born 1974 in Cologne) is a German biochemist and developer of one of the first versions of the MediaWiki software.

Magnus Manske in 2012

Career

Manske studied biochemistry at the University of Cologne and graduated in 2006 with a PhD; his dissertation was an open source tool for molecular biology called GENtle.[1][2][3] Manske has worked in Cambridge with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute since April 2007, but remains active in the development of tools for Wikipedia.[4]

Development of MediaWiki

While a student, Manske became involved with the NuPedia project, and developed tools and extensions for NuPedia. Later, Manske developed one of the first versions of what later became MediaWiki.[5]

The wiki software that was initially used for Wikipedia was called UseModWiki and was written in Perl. 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."[6] On January 25, 2002, Manske released the first version of a MySQL-based PHP wiki engine, called Phase II.[7][8] 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.[6] Phase II also introduced a number of other features which are still present, including file upload, watchlists, automatic signatures, and user contributions list.[9][10]

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.[11]

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.[8] The resultant Mediawiki 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 tools and extensions for Mediawiki, including tools to map category membership, compute category intersections, and import images from Flickr to Commons.[12][13] Manske also developed the Cite extension which brought an XML-like syntax to citation management.[14]

Recognition

  • Jimmy Wales in 2002 named January 25th 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."[15][16]
  • Larry Sanger, 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 an important role:

Wikipedia started with a handful of people, many from Nupedia. The influence of Nupedians was crucial early on. I think, especially, of the tireless Magnus Manske (who worked on the software for both projects), our resident stickler Ruth Ifcher, and the very smart poker-playing programmer Lee Daniel Crocker—to name a few...But the facts that the project started with these good people, and that we were able to adopt, explain, and promote good habits and policies to newer people, partly accounts for why the project was able to develop a robust, functional community and eventually to succeed.[17]

  • Manske and others were recognized by the USENIX Advanced Computing Technical Association with a STUG award (Software Tools User Group) in June 2010 for their contributions to the Wikipedia software. Manske was recognized as a major contributor to MediaWiki.[18]

Selected publications

  • Magnus Manske, Olivo Miotto, Susana Campino,; et al. (2012). "Analysis of Plasmodium falciparum diversity in Natural Infections by Deep Sequencing". Nature. 487 (7407): 375–379. doi:10.1038/nature11174. PMID 22722859. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Magnus Manske, Dominic P. Kwiatkowski (2009). "LookSeq: A browser-based viewer for deep sequencing data". Genome Research. 19 (11): 2125–2132. doi:10.1101/gr.093443.109. PMC 2775587. PMID 19679872. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Magnus Manske, Dominic P. Kwiatkowski (2009). "SNP-o-matic". Bioinformatics. 25 (18): 2434–2435. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp403. PMC 2735664. PMID 19574284. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • "Drug-Resistant Genotypes and Multi-Clonality in Plasmodium falciparum Analysed by Direct Genome Sequencing from Peripheral Blood of Malaria Patients". PLOS ONE. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help)
  • Magnus Manske (2006). GENtle, a free multi-purpose molecular biology tool (Thesis). University of Cologne.

Further reading

  • Robert Zeschke. WikiHooks - Eine protoypenhafte Webhook Extension für MediaWiki. p. 9. ISBN 978-3-640-96452-9.

References

  1. ^ Magnus Manske (2006). GENtle, a free multi-purpose molecular biology tool (Thesis). University of Cologne.
  2. ^ Magnus Manske. "GENtle". Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  3. ^ Alastair Kerr (June 21, 2011). "Desktop Sequence Analysis: software review". Bioinformatics Knowledge Blog. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  4. ^ "Magnus Manske". Retrieved June 4, 2013.
  5. ^ Jennifer Joline Anderson (2011). Wikipedia: The Company and Its Founders. ABDO. p. 44. ISBN 9781617148125.
  6. ^ a b Sumana Harihareswara; Guillaume Paumier (2012). "MediaWiki". In Amy Brown; Greg Wilson (eds.). The Architecture of Open Source Applications. Kristian Hermansen. ISBN 9781105571817.
  7. ^ Andrew Lih (2009). The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. Hyperion. ISBN 9781401303716.
  8. ^ a b Template:Cite article
  9. ^ "Wikipedia:PHP script new features". 27 January 2002. Retrieved June 4, 2013.
  10. ^ Magnus Manske (27 January 2002). "[Wikipedia-l] New features list". Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  11. ^ N. A. Polukarova (June 2007). "The concept of open editing from the copyright viewpoint". Automatic Documentation and Mathematical Linguistics. 41 (3). Allerton Press, Inc.: 104–107. doi:10.3103/S0005105507030053. ISSN 1934-8371. In simpler words, while the developers of proprietary programs use their copyrights to deprive most of the users of most of their freedoms, GPL adherents, including above-mentioned Magnus Manske, use these privileges to guarantee these freedoms to users.
  12. ^ "Magnus' toys'n'tools". Retrieved June 4, 2013.
  13. ^ "Magnus' tools on wmflabs". Retrieved June 4, 2013.
  14. ^ Mathias Schindler; Denny Vrandečić (March 2009). "Introducing new features to Wikipedia" (PDF). In Jim Hendler; Helen Margetts (eds.). Proceedings of the First International Conference on Web Sciences WebSci09. Athens, Greece. Retrieved June 4, 2013. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  15. ^ "[Wikipedia-l] Celebration". January 25, 2002. Retrieved June 4, 2013.
  16. ^ "Wikipedia:Magnus Manske Day". Retrieved June 4, 2013.
  17. ^ Larry Sanger (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir". Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  18. ^ "STUG award". Retrieved June 4, 2013.

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