Magnus Manske

Last updated

Magnus Manske
Magnus Manske crop.jpg
Manske at Wikidata's Third Birthday Party by Wikimedia Deutschland in 2015
Born
Heinrich Magnus Manske

(1974-05-24) 24 May 1974 (age 50)
Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany
Alma mater University of Cologne
Known for
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis GENtle, a free multi-purpose molecular biology tool  (2006)
Doctoral advisor
  • Helmut W. Klein
  • Sabine Waffenschmidt [2]
Magnus Manske's voice
Magnus Manske speaks on Wikipedia and its software and tools for a radio program, in Stockholm, Sweden, August 2019.
Website MagnusManske.de

Heinrich Magnus Manske (born 24 May 1974) is a German biochemist who is a leading researcher on malaria. He is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK [1] [3] [4] [5] [6] 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.

Contents

Early life

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. [2] [7]

Career

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. [8] Manske has worked in Cambridge with the Wellcome Sanger Institute since April 2007, [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] but remains active in the development of tools for Wikipedia [14] and its sister projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. [15]

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. [9] [16]

Development of MediaWiki

As a student, Manske was one of the most active contributors to the Nupedia project, [17] submitting content on biology topics [8] and developing tools and extensions for Nupedia. [18] Later, unhappy with the existing software's limitations, [17] Manske developed one of the first versions of what later became MediaWiki. [18] [19] His new version of the software was installed in 2002. [17]

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". [20] On 25 January 2002, Manske released the first version of a MySQL-based PHP wiki engine, called Phase II. [21] 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. [20] Phase II also introduced a number of other features which are still present, including file upload, watchlists, automatic signatures, and user contributions list. [22] [23] 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. [17] [24]

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. [25]

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". [21] 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 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. [26] [27] [28] Manske also developed the Cite extension which brought an XML-like syntax to citation management. [29]

Tools

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. [30]

Recognition

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. [31] [32] [33]

Jimmy Wales in 2002 named 25 January 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." [34]

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 a role: [35]

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...Still, because the project started with these good people, and we were able to adopt, explain, and promote good habits and policies to newer people, the Nupedian roots of the project helped to develop a robust, functional and successful community.

Manske, along with others, was recognized as a major contributor to MediaWiki by the USENIX Advanced Computing Technical Association in 2010 when MediaWiki and the Wikimedia Foundation were honoured with a STUG award (Software Tools User Group). [36]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Wikipedia</span>

Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki</span> Type of website that visitors can edit

A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MediaWiki</span> Free and open-source wiki software

MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker, after which it has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software. MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second. Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages. The software has more than 1,000 configuration settings and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom, wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia.

In genetics, an expressed sequence tag (EST) is a short sub-sequence of a cDNA sequence. ESTs may be used to identify gene transcripts, and were instrumental in gene discovery and in gene-sequence determination. The identification of ESTs has proceeded rapidly, with approximately 74.2 million ESTs now available in public databases. EST approaches have largely been superseded by whole genome and transcriptome sequencing and metagenome sequencing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wellcome Sanger Institute</span> British genomics research institute

The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jimmy Wales</span> Co-founder of Wikipedia (born 1966)

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales, is an Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the non-profit free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.

Rfam is a database containing information about non-coding RNA (ncRNA) families and other structured RNA elements. It is an annotated, open access database originally developed at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in collaboration with Janelia Farm, and currently hosted at the European Bioinformatics Institute. Rfam is designed to be similar to the Pfam database for annotating protein families.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of wikis</span> History of wiki collaborative platforms

The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bomis</span> Dot-com company (1996–2007)

Bomis, was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Sanger</span> American Internet project developer and Wikipedia co-founder

Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, an online encyclopedia, and co-founded its successor Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. He coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nupedia</span> English-language online encyclopedia (2000–2003)

Nupedia was an English-language online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with relevant subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia operated from October 1999 until September 2003. It is best known today as the predecessor of Wikipedia. Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating. Nupedia was designed by a committee of experts who predefined the rules. It had only 21 articles in its first year, compared with Wikipedia having 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DNA annotation</span> The process of describing the structure and function of a genome

In molecular biology and genetics, DNA annotation or genome annotation is the process of describing the structure and function of the components of a genome, by analyzing and interpreting them in order to extract their biological significance and understand the biological processes in which they participate. Among other things, it identifies the locations of genes and all the coding regions in a genome and determines what those genes do.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of Wikipedia</span> Free online crowdsourced encyclopedia

The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BlueSpice</span> Wiki software

BlueSpice is free wiki software based on the MediaWiki engine and licensed with the GNU General Public License. It is especially developed for businesses as an enterprise wiki distribution for MediaWiki and used in over 150 countries.

Single nucleotide polymorphism annotation is the process of predicting the effect or function of an individual SNP using SNP annotation tools. In SNP annotation the biological information is extracted, collected and displayed in a clear form amenable to query. SNP functional annotation is typically performed based on the available information on nucleic acid and protein sequences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Bateman</span> British bioinformatician

Alexander George Bateman is a computational biologist and Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Cambridge, UK. He has led the development of the Pfam biological database and introduced the Rfam database of RNA families. He has also been involved in the use of Wikipedia for community-based annotation of biological databases.

Transcriptomics technologies are the techniques used to study an organism's transcriptome, the sum of all of its RNA transcripts. The information content of an organism is recorded in the DNA of its genome and expressed through transcription. Here, mRNA serves as a transient intermediary molecule in the information network, whilst non-coding RNAs perform additional diverse functions. A transcriptome captures a snapshot in time of the total transcripts present in a cell. Transcriptomics technologies provide a broad account of which cellular processes are active and which are dormant. A major challenge in molecular biology is to understand how a single genome gives rise to a variety of cells. Another is how gene expression is regulated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dominic Kwiatkowski</span> English medical researcher (1953–2023)

Dominic Kwiatkowski was an English medical researcher and geneticist who was head of the parasites and microbes programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge and a Professor of Genomics at the University of Oxford. Kwiatkowski applied genomics and computational analysis to problems in infectious disease, with the aim of finding ways to reduce the burden of disease in the developing world.

References

  1. 1 2 Magnus Manske publications indexed by Google Scholar
  2. 1 2 Magnus Manske (2006). GENtle, a free multi-purpose molecular biology tool (PhD thesis). University of Cologne. Archived from the original on 7 April 2015. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  3. ↑ Magnus Manske at DBLP Bibliography Server OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  4. ↑ Magnus Manske publications indexed by Microsoft Academic
  5. ↑ Magnus Manske's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  6. ↑ Daub, J.; Gardner, P. P.; Tate, J.; Ramsköld, D.; Manske, M.; Scott, W. G.; Weinberg, Z.; Griffiths-Jones, S.; Bateman, A. (2008). "The RNA WikiProject: Community annotation of RNA families". RNA. 14 (12): 2462–2464. doi:10.1261/rna.1200508. PMC   2590952 . PMID   18945806.
  7. ↑ Alastair Kerr (21 June 2011). "Desktop Sequence Analysis: software review". Bioinformatics Knowledge Blog. Archived from the original on 30 September 2018. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  8. 1 2 Claudia Lehnen (2 February 2008). "Der Wikipedia-Pionier aus Köln" [The Wikipedia pioneer from Cologne]. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (in German). Archived from the original on 12 July 2015. Retrieved 22 June 2013.
  9. 1 2 Manske, M.; Miotto, O.; Campino, S.; Auburn, S.; Almagro-Garcia, J.; Maslen, G.; o'Brien, J.; Djimde, A.; Doumbo, O.; Zongo, I.; Ouedraogo, J. B.; Michon, P.; Mueller, I.; Siba, P.; Nzila, A.; Borrmann, S.; Kiara, S. M.; Marsh, K.; Jiang, H.; Su, X. Z.; Amaratunga, C.; Fairhurst, R.; Socheat, D.; Nosten, F.; Imwong, M.; White, N. J.; Sanders, M.; Anastasi, E.; Alcock, D.; et al. (2012). "Analysis of Plasmodium falciparum diversity in natural infections by deep sequencing". Nature. 487 (7407): 375–9. Bibcode:2012Natur.487..375M. doi:10.1038/nature11174. PMC   3738909 . PMID   22722859.
  10. ↑ Manske, H. M.; Kwiatkowski, D. P. (2009). "Look Seq: A browser-based viewer for deep sequencing data". Genome Research. 19 (11): 2125–32. doi:10.1101/gr.093443.109. PMC   2775587 . PMID   19679872.
  11. ↑ Manske, H. M.; Kwiatkowski, D. P. (2009). "SNP-o-matic". Bioinformatics. 25 (18): 2434–5. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp403. PMC   2735664 . PMID   19574284.
  12. ↑ Robinson, T.; Campino, S. G.; Auburn, S.; Assefa, S. A.; Polley, S. D.; Manske, M.; MacInnis, B.; Rockett, K. A.; Maslen, G. L.; Sanders, M.; Quail, M. A.; Chiodini, P. L.; Kwiatkowski, D. P.; Clark, T. G.; Sutherland, C. J. (2011). "Drug-Resistant Genotypes and Multi-Clonality in Plasmodium falciparum Analysed by Direct Genome Sequencing from Peripheral Blood of Malaria Patients". PLOS ONE. 6 (8): e23204. Bibcode:2011PLoSO...623204R. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023204 . PMC   3154926 . PMID   21853089.
  13. ↑ Logan, D. W.; Sandal, M.; Gardner, P. P.; Manske, M.; Bateman, A. (2010). "Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia". PLOS Computational Biology . 6 (9): e1000941. Bibcode:2010PLSCB...6E0941L. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941 . PMC   2947980 . PMID   20941386. Open Access logo PLoS transparent.svg
  14. ↑ "Magnus Manske". Archived from the original on 13 June 2013. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  15. ↑ "Wikimedia-related tools by Magnus Manske". Archived from the original on 14 December 2018. Retrieved 4 May 2017.
  16. ↑ "DNA Research; Putting parasites on the world map". China Weekly News. 26 June 2012.
  17. 1 2 3 4 Kurt Jansson (14 January 2011). "Zehn Jahre Wikipedia – Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie". Der Spiegel . Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 25 June 2013.
  18. 1 2 Jennifer Joline Anderson (2011). Wikipedia: The Company and Its Founders. ABDO. p.  44. ISBN   978-1-61714-812-5.
  19. ↑ Torsten Kleinz (16 December 2012). "Neues Werkzeug soll Anfänger zur Wikipedia locken". Die Zeit . Archived from the original on 10 August 2019. Retrieved 25 June 2013.
  20. 1 2 Sumana Harihareswara; Guillaume Paumier (2012). "MediaWiki". In Amy Brown; Greg Wilson (eds.). The Architecture of Open Source Applications. Kristian Hermansen. ISBN   978-1-105-57181-7. Archived from the original on 24 September 2013. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  21. 1 2 Rajeev Kumar. "Wiki Installation and Customization". Archived from the original on 21 July 2015. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  22. ↑ "Wikipedia:PHP script new features". Wikipedia. 27 January 2002. Archived from the original on 7 June 2020. Retrieved 27 November 2016.
  23. ↑ Magnus Manske (27 January 2002). "[Wikipedia-l] New features list". Archived from the original on 12 November 2015. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  24. ↑ Erik Möller (9 May 2003). "Das Wiki-Prinzip". Heise Online. Archived from the original on 2 September 2016. Retrieved 25 June 2013.
  25. ↑ N. A. Polukarova (June 2007). "The concept of open editing from the copyright viewpoint". Automatic Documentation and Mathematical Linguistics. 41 (3): 104–107. doi:10.3103/S0005105507030053. ISSN   1934-8371. S2CID   6463839. 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.
  26. ↑ "Magnus' toys'n'tools". Archived from the original on 10 May 2014. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  27. ↑ "Magnus' tools on wmflabs". Archived from the original on 14 May 2020. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  28. ↑ "Tools Directory". Wikimedia Foundation. Archived from the original on 1 February 2019. Retrieved 31 January 2019.
  29. ↑ Mathias Schindler; Denny Vrandečić (March 2009). "Introducing new features to Wikipedia" (PDF). In Hendler, Jim; Margetts, Helen (eds.). Proceedings of the First International Conference on Web Sciences WebSci09. Athens, Greece. Archived (PDF) from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  30. ↑ Vrandečić, Denny; Pintscher, Lydia; Krötzsch, Markus (30 April 2023). "Wikidata: The Making Of". Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 615–624. doi: 10.1145/3543873.3585579 . ISBN   978-1-4503-9419-2.
  31. ↑ "German Wikipedia reaches landmark millionth entry". Deutsche Welle. 28 December 2009. Archived from the original on 6 June 2015. Retrieved 25 June 2013.
  32. ↑ dpa/mos (28 December 2009). "Deutsche Wikipedia erreicht eine Million Einträge". Die Zeit . Archived from the original on 25 August 2016. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  33. ↑ Achim Sawall (28 December 2009). "Deutschsprachige Wikipedia erreicht die Millionenmarke". golem.de. Archived from the original on 21 May 2021. Retrieved 25 June 2013.
  34. ↑ "[Wikipedia-l] Celebration". 25 January 2002. Archived from the original on 31 October 2020. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  35. ↑ Larry Sanger (2008). "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir". In Chris DiBona; Danese Cooper; Mark Stone (eds.). Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution. O'Reilly Media. p. 317. ISBN   978-0-596-55389-0.
  36. ↑ "STUG award". 6 December 2011. Archived from the original on 11 January 2012. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.