Lee Daniel Crocker

American software programmer (born 1963)

  • Computer programmer
  • Wikipedian

Lee Daniel Crocker (born July 3, 1963) is an American computer programmer. He is best known for rewriting the software upon which Wikipedia runs, to address scalability problems. This software, originally known as "Phase III", went live in July 2002 and became the foundation of what is now called MediaWiki. MediaWiki's code repository was still named "phase3" until the move from Subversion to Git in March 2012.

He is a co-author of the PNG specification, and was also involved in the creation of the GIF and JPEG image file formats. He invented the per-scanline variable pre-filtering compression method used by PNG, the sum-of-abs heuristic used by many encoding programs.[1] In 1998, he was one of the 23 original creators of the "Transhumanist Declaration".[2] As of 1999, he was a member of the Extropians futurist society.[3]

In June 2010, Crocker was among those recognized by the Software Tools Users Group (STUG) as a major contributor to MediaWiki when they awarded MediaWiki and the Wikimedia Foundation the USENIX Advanced Computing Technical Association STUG award for "the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia".[4]

See also

References

  1. ^ Friedland, Gerald; Jain, Ramesh (July 28, 2014). Multimedia Computing. Cambridge University Press. p. 151. ISBN 978-0521764513.
  2. ^ More, Max; Vita-More, Natasha (March 5, 2013). "Transhumanist Declaration 2012". The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1118555996.
  3. ^ Brin, David (1999). The Transparent Society. Basic Books. p. 102. ISBN 9780738201443.
  4. ^ "STUG Award". USENIX. December 6, 2011. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lee Daniel Crocker.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Lee Daniel Crocker.
  • Lee Daniel Crocker's user page on Wikipedia
  • Information Week May 7, 2007: The Best Web Software Ever Written Archived February 7, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  • San Diego Union-Tribune December 6, 2004: Everyone's Encyclopedia
  • Dr. Dobb's Journal #232 July 1995 (Vol 20, Issue 7), pp. 36–44: PNG: The Portable Network Graphic Format