About Magnus Manske
Heinrich Magnus Manske is a German biochemist who is a researcher on malaria. He is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome 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 wiki-based websites. 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. Later, unhappy with the existing software's limitations, Manske developed one of the first versions of what later became MediaWiki. On 25 January 2002, Manske released the first version of a MySQL-based PHP wiki engine, called Phase II. 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.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.