Danwe

My name is Daniel A. R. Werner. I am a MediaWiki user and extension developer since 2007. From April 2012 to October 2013 I was working for Wikimedia Deutschland .e.V. where I was part of the initial core team of Wikidata developers.

☞ I might be able to help out with MediaWiki related development work: Contact me if you seek an expert for MediaWiki, Wikibase (Wikidata) or Semantic MediaWiki.

MediaWiki and Me

I started being a MediaWiki developer when my need for custom tailored extensions rose. I started by improving existing Extensions and committed most of my code changes for everyone to use. Even though I have not worked with PHP before, as a professional programmer I found my way into MediaWiki hacking quite fast and still find it fascinating what one can do with MediaWiki. I am a huge fan of Semantic MediaWiki which I was using extensively for my RPG-Dev-Wiki project, a tool for making the process of producing RPGs (so called role-playing games) more intuitive, team-oriented while keeping redundancy in story-writing to a minimum.

In April 2012 I started working as a developer on Wikidata. After nineteen great months in an awesome team I decided to part ways and started providing MediaWiki related freelancing work as well as working on my own projects again since November 2013.

Since October 2015 I am working as developer and tech lead for the Berlin based startup Contentful. We are building an API-first content management platform to create, manage and publish content on any digital channel.

☞ Get in touch with me if you are an experienced developer thinking about working here in Berlin.

Extensions

The following will introduce you to most of my MediaWiki related work:

My own MediaWiki extensions:

• Semantic Expressivness, adds a new syntax for inline short queries to fight redundancies within the wiki.
• Subpage Fun, some parser functions/variables to get helpful information about subpages.
• Simple Farm, simple, yet powerful wiki farm extension without any fancy configuration pages.
• Parser Fun, Introduces the THIS: prefix for page information related magic variables and adds a parser function #parse for parsing wikitext as well as a {{CALLER}} variable/function for some kind of template call-stack.
• Regex Fun, simply the richest implementation for regular expressions in MediaWiki.
• HashTables, similar to to Extension:ArrayExtension but for handling hash tables in MediaWiki. This extension also allows to store all Parameters given to a template.
• SemanticUpdateOnPurge, updates Semantic MediaWikis attributes when purging an article.
• Several (currently) non-public extensions and a bot framework for my MediaWiki-based system RPG-Dev-Wiki.
• Stick to That Language, makes links sticky in relation to the current interface language by using and considering a MediaWiki url's uselang query part.

Extensions I have made substantial contributions to:

• Wikibase, extension used by the Wikidata project. I used to work on this extension as a former employee of Wikimedia Germany for 19 months.
• Variables, responsible for version 2.0 rewrite and more.
• Arrays, responsible for new features and bugfixes since version 1.3
• Loops, responsible for development in svn starting with version 0.3.2
• Semantic Result Formats, responsible for hash and array formats.
• DataValues, a collection of objects representing various kinds of values.
• ValueViews, extensible jQuery widget for displaying and editing different data values.

Extensions I have made some minor contributions to:

• Validator, changes introduced in 0.4.13 release.
• Maps, marker groups implementation, and re-integration of the previously broken custom picture maps feature based on OpenLayers.

Misc

Note: On en.wikipedia I am registered as en:User:Danwe From the Other Planet, I am not en:User:Danwe since that name has been taken since the pre-unified accounts era.