Wikipedia volunteers avert tragedy by taking down gunman at conference

BARRY WILLIAMS / N.Y. DAILY NEWS via TRIBUNE

Police respond to Civic Hall on East 14th Street in Manhattan after a gunman jumped onstage at a Wikipedia conference today.

NEW YORK >> The armed man came striding up the aisle at a conference for Wikipedia editors this morning in Manhattan, several witnesses said.

The man, draped in a multicolored flag, walked onto the stage and stood next to Maryana Iskander, the chief of the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, interrupting her speech. He announced that he was going to kill himself. He held a gun near his head and pointed it toward the ceiling.

The audience of well over 100 people panicked.

“People started yelling, ‘Get down, get down!’ and people started ducking behind their chairs,” said Bill Adair, a journalism professor who was there and is writing a book on Wikipedia.

A man in an orange sweatshirt rushed the stage. He was not in law enforcement, but a Wikipedia contributor on the conference’s “trust and safety team”: Richard Knipel, the City University of New York’s “Wikimedian-in-residence.” He grabbed the gunman from behind.

Another Wikipedian on the trust and safety team, Andrew Lih, had been standing watch in the aisle and charged forward, too.

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“I saw the gun he’s holding go from pointing up at the ceiling to sweeping down toward the room, and as it swept across me I said ‘Oh, my God,’ and I ducked down, but I still kept moving” said Lih, a digital strategist who works with museums and libraries.

“I grabbed his arm,” he continued. “He was still clutching his gun pretty hard. I pried his fingers away from it, removed it from his hands and put it down.”

The gun was loaded, according to a senior law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a pending investigation.

In seconds, a potential scene of bloodshed had been averted, a life may have been saved, and two volunteer editors of an online encyclopedia had become unlikely heroes.

Wikipedia is famous for its real-time entries on unfolding disasters, but as of Friday evening it had not posted an entry about the near-tragedy at WikiConference North America at Civic Hall in Union Square. The annual gathering was being held in New York City for the first time in over a decade.

Other Wikipedia editors responded to Knipel’s courageous act by awarding him several “Barnstars,” the site’s official tokens of appreciation. “​​You’ve got some guts man!” wrote a user who awarded him a Barnstar of Diligence. Knipel did not respond to a request for comment.

The armed man’s motivations were murky. But he was wearing a sign around his neck that said “anti-contact non-offending pedophile” and he told the audience he was going to die by suicide to protest what he called Wikipedia’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on pedophiles.

The site has a rule that editors “who identify themselves as pedophiles will be blocked and banned indefinitely.”

Officers took the man into custody and he remained there this afternoon, a police spokesperson said, adding that no charges had been filed and that the investigation was continuing. The police did not release the man’s name.

The theme of this year’s four-day conference is “Wiki World’s Fair.” After the morning commotion, the rest of the events scheduled for today were canceled. But Iskander, whose speech the gunman interrupted, spoke to the audience briefly to acknowledge the contributors who had grabbed the man and the gun, said Adair.

“Richard and Andrew have been very busy,” Iskander told the crowd, Adair said. “I thank them for saving my life.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

© 2025 The New York Times Company

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