"Crocker stumbled across Wikipedia early on. There were gaping holes in the encyclopedia's content, so he pitched in. As a semiprofessional poker player, he wrote the site's original poker article. As a fan of the martini, he wrote about that topic. "In the early days, it was pretty easy to find topics that needed to be covered," Crocker said. "It's not that easy today. It's pretty complete." Crocker wrote entries about Ken Kesey, Walter Annenberg, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and dozens of other topics. "Nowadays I'm not as active, but I still write," he said. "I spent a couple of hours on Wikipedia every day for a long time." In addition to writing articles, Crocker wrote new wiki software when the original program proved too slow to handle the site's growing popularity. Crocker embraced Wikipedia because he believes information should be free."
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Computer scientists from the United StatesProgrammers from the United StatesSoftware engineers from the United StatesPeople from Georgia (U.S. state)Transhumanists
Original Language: English
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Sources
Jonathan Sidener, in "Everyone's Encyclopedia" in The Union Tribune (6 December 2004)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lee_Daniel_Crocker
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Lee Daniel Crocker
Lee Daniel Crocker (born 3 July 1963) is an American computer programmer and poker player, most famous for rewriting the software upon which Wikipedia runs to address scalability problems; originally known as "Phase III" this became the foundation of what is now called MediaWiki. He was involved in the creation of the GIF, JPEG, and PNG image file formats, and appears as a co-author of the PNG specification.
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