Péter Gervai

Péter Gervai, born on 7 January 1972, is a Hungarian IT development engineer, the founder of the Hungarian Wikipedia and the chair of Wikimedia Hungary. He was one of the pioneers of Internet culture in Hungary, as operator of the LifeForce BBS and the author of a snarky webpage about chain emails which was widely used to educate senders of such mail. He graduated from Fazekas Mihály Gimnázium in 1990 and studied at Kandó Kálmán Műszaki Főiskola in Budapest. He worked at FidoNet as a moderator, maintained the LifeForce BBS, which was among the pioneers in Hungary, started the Hungarian part of the Mozilla Open Directory and took part in several open source projects. He was a BBS sysop and FidoNet node from 1984 to 1999, a software engineer at Budapest Bank from 1994 to 1997 and technical director of Cory-Net from 1997 to 2005; in 2008 he was elected president of the newly formed Hungarian Wikimedia Association, and in 2009 he received the eFestival Lifetime Achievement Award of the Hungarian Association of Content Industry for establishing the Hungarian-language Wikipedia.