Developer activity

These are some of the people behind MediaWiki development and server administration team. From 2005-2008 or so

Software

Brion Vibber, Release Manager extraordinnaire
Tim Starling, first Developer Liaison; see Tim Starling Day

Magnus, Erik Zachte, Eloquence, Gwicke, Domas, Ashar
Camille Constans, Peter Danenberg, Andre Engels, Thomas Koll
Timwi, Tomasz Wegrzanowski, Zhengzhu

Server administration

Jamesday, Kate Turner, mark-

Camille Constans

Shaihulud (Camille Constans) is a French sysadmin, hoping to become a developer soon. He's 27 years old and has a 5-year degree in industry engineering from a French school. He worked on the statistics, the backup system, and MySQL replication. He also performed the conversion of some wikis to UTF-8. He will begin studying computer science in October 2004.

Peter Danenberg

Peter Danenberg is dissertating at ISI under Stacy Marsella in computational narrative; he has been degreed from time to time, and at various institutions, in: philosophy, classics, Germanistics, piano performance and comparative literature.

His office at MediaWiki is the on-going development of WikiTeX.

James Day

James Day is a Unix and Windows systems administrator from England. He has been involved in MediaWiki since early 2004, and mainly works on database-related tasks. He is generally appreciated for his quiet and friendly character which balance his rather controversial positions on legal and financial matters. In short, a good asset in a community.

Andre Engels

Andre Engels is 32 years old, Dutch, and at the moment looking for a job, probably as a software engineer. He has an M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in computer science (software engineering/formal methods). Andre has been around almost from the start. He has Wikipedia's second-highest edit count. His activity on MediaWiki is restricted to Dutch localization, but he is mentioned here because he is active for the Python Wikipediabot framework (including the interwiki bot).

Thomas R. Koll

Thomas R. Koll is a German developer. He fixed bugs for MediaWiki and developed two or three bots for pywikipediabot. He also maintains the web-shop.

Magnus Manske

Magnus Manske is German. He is a student (biochemistry, genetics, informatics) at the University of Cologne, Germany. He was a very active participant on Nupedia, as an author of many biology articles, as a coder, and as one of the first and most active participants on the Nupedia Chalkboard. He is the original author of the PHP script and is still active among the developers. As he says, I /used to be/ the development team, back in the old days. Magnus mostly takes care of feature development. He is a quiet and smiling guy (well, at least electronically), who is probably little known by most editors due to his discretion.

Domas Mituzas

Domas Mituzas is a 23-year Lithuanian database engineer, working for MySQL AB He is working mainly on site performance and scaling.

Erik Möller

Erik Möller, aka Eloquence, is 26 years old and lives in Berlin, Germany. He has a diploma in computer science, works as a freelance writer and has coding experience in various programming languages. If you want to hear an opinion on whether something is a good idea or not, he will almost certainly give it to you. His code contributions are mostly in the area of feature development and are detailed on his user page. They include the popular "section editing" feature and associated auto-summaries, the table of contents, talk pages for anonymous users, and the graphical edit toolbar.

PayPal: moeller at scireview dot de.

Tim Starling

Tim Starling is Australian and a PhD student in physics. He was Wikimedia's Developer Liaison during part of 2004. He considers himself a programmer, and has been writing lots of code, but also spends a lot of his time doing server administration and helpdesk work for non-Wikimedia users on the #mediawiki IRC channel. Tim is very active on IRC and responsive to newbie questions.
See Wikimedia:User:Tim Starling.

Timwi

Timwi (Arne Heizmann) is a recent computer science graduate with a previous bachelor degree in mathematics. Originally German, he is now living in Cambridge, England. He tends to be active on the IRC channels and the technical mailing list. He helped fixing bugs and has been involved in the setting up of MediaZilla. He is currently working on a new lex/yacc-based parser for MediaWiki. He used to be a developer, support volunteer and translator at LiveJournal.
PayPal: timwi@gmx.net

Brion Vibber

Brion Vibber is 25 years old and lives in the USA. He has been involved as a developer for about 3 years and is currently among the most active developers. He has probably poked his finger in every development task, from maintenance of servers, performance improvement, development of features, debugging, interface, "hotline" etc. Brion holds a special place in many Wikipedians' hearts for two reasons. First, back when all the non-English Wikipedias were very very small, Brion was very involved in helping internationalization. Secondly, Brion is ideologically apolitical. Which makes him quite an exception.
Donate to Brion via paypal

Ashar Voultoiz

Ashar Voultoiz is the Internet avatar of a 25-year-old Frenchman living in Nantes. He spent 4 years at the UUNET France Noc, where he learnt about maintenance and monitoring of both networks and servers. He is mainly involved in bug fixing and code optimisation. He is willing, most of the time, to help MediaWiki users and site administrators on IRC. He knows a bit about the Python Wikipediabot Framework.

Tomasz Wegrzanowski

Tomasz Wegrzanowski is from Poland. He has been very involved in math system and some other changes, plus bugfixing. He manages administration and technical support, mostly for Polish Wikipedia, Polish Wiktionary, and Kashubian Wikipedia.

Gabriel Wicke

Gabriel Wicke is a 26-year-old German student of computer science. He's worked pretty much full-time on MediaWiki development from Jan-June '04, starting with the implementation of the Squid caching and load-balancing system and including the MonoBook skin, parser standards/performance tuning and system administration. Now he's studying too.

Apart from computer stuff his interests include sailing, psychology, neurology and music.

Erik Zachte

Erik Zachte is Dutch, 50 years old and lives in Amsterdam. His interests include science, history, movies, modern art and games. Erik studied biochemistry and history each for several years and visited art school (Rietveld Academy) for two years. He now works as a software engineer at KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) for 24 years. He is also one of those rather discreet developers, who chose to mostly focus on stand-alone projects. He is author of the

• International Statistics: lots of tables and charts on many aspects of Wikipedia, available in over 20 languages, updated monthly.
• TomeRaider version for Windows and Pocket PC, Palm and EPOC handhelds (over 50,000 visitors on his support page). The conversion script features a home-grown TeX (math formulas) rendering engine, unicode support, and patches up most invalid HTML.
• EasyTimeline, his most recent project, allows generation of graphical timelines from a reasonably intuitive syntax. It has still some loose ends to tie up (Unicode font support for Japanese, Chinese etc. are planned this year).

Zhengzhu

Zhengzhu is from China, currently doing his PhD in Computer Science in the US. He is currently working on the Traditional/Simplified Chinese issue. He is also interested in other issues such as the user interface, the search engine, and vandal detection. He is pretty new to the dev team, and has little experience working in an open source environment. But he is making progress, slowly but surely...