‘Pried fingers away from gun’: Wikipedia volunteers take down gunman at US conference

NEW YORK – An armed man came striding up the aisle at a US conference for Wikipedia editors early on Oct 17 in Manhattan, several witnesses said.

The man, draped in a multicoloured flag, walked onto the stage and stood next to Ms Maryana Iskander, chief executive of the non-profit 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 towards 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 Mr 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”: Mr 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, Mr Andrew Lih, had been standing watch in the aisle and charged forward too.

“I saw the gun he was holding go from pointing up at the ceiling to sweeping down towards the room, and as it swept across me, I said, ‘Oh, my God’, and I ducked down, but I still kept moving,” said Mr 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 condition of anonymity to discuss a pending investigation.

In seconds, the potential scene of bloodshed at WikiConference North America at Civic Hall in Union Square had been averted, a life may have been saved, and two volunteer editors of an online encyclopaedia had become unlikely heroes.

Other Wikipedia editors responded to Mr 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.

Mr Knipel did not respond to a request for comment.

Murky motivations

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

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

Officers took the man into custody, and he remained there late on Oct 17, a police spokesman 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 the four-day conference is “Wiki World’s Fair”. After the morning commotion, the rest of the events scheduled for Oct 17 were cancelled.

But Ms Iskander, whose speech the gunman interrupted, spoke to the audience briefly to acknowledge the contributors who grabbed the man and the gun, said Mr Adair.

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

Wikipedia is famous for its real-time history entries on unfolding disasters, and the page for WikiConference North America has already been updated: “On (the) morning of the 2025 conference, a man wielded a gun while threatening to kill himself, before a Wikipedia contributor at the conference grabbed him. No shots were fired.” NYTIMES