Heinrich Magnus Manske was born on 24 May 1974 and is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and a software developer of one of the first versions of the MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia and a number of other websites.
11 Facts About Magnus Manske
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Magnus 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.
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Magnus Manske has worked in Cambridge with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute since April 2007, but remains active in the development of tools for Wikipedia and its sister projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
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In 2012, Magnus Manske was co-author of a paper published in Nature that demonstrated new ways to identify areas where malaria parasites are evolving, and described techniques for mapping malarial drug resistance.
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Later, unhappy with the existing software's limitations, Magnus Manske developed one of the first versions of what later became MediaWiki.
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On 25 January 2002, Magnus Manske released the first version of a MySQL-based PHP wiki engine, called Phase II.
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Magnus Manske's re-write made it easier to integrate photographs in Wikipedia articles, and created a new user group: administrators, empowered to delete pages and block vandals.
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Magnus 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.
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Magnus 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 to Commons.
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Magnus Manske developed the Cite extension which brought an XML-like syntax to citation management.
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Magnus Manske is recognized as the creator of the first article in the German Wikipedia, which was on the polymerase chain reaction, first written by him in 2001.