Герман биохимигі және MediaWiki жасаушысы Хельмут Манске

German biochemist and MediaWiki developer

Helmut W. Klein
Sabine Waffenschmidt and a software developer of one of the first versions of the MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia and a number of other wiki based websites.

Manske was born in Cologne, Germany. He 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.

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 Cambridge with the Wellcome Sanger Institute since April 2007, but remains active in the development of tools for Wikipedia and its sister projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. In 2012, 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. The researchers developed a technique to extract the malaria parasite DNA directly from the blood, which minimizes errors in sequencing.

As a student, Manske was one of the most active contributors to the Nupedia project, submitting content on biology topics His new version of the software was installed in 2002. On 25 January 2002, Manske released the first version of a MySQL 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. 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". Manske also developed the Cite extension which brought an XML like syntax to citation management.

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.