Ohio man charged after brandishing gun at New York City Wikipedia conference | New York
An Ohio man is facing charges after allegedly taking a gun to the stage at a Wikipedia conference in New York City — as well as holding a sign declaring him an “innocent pedophile” — and threatening to kill himself.
27-year-old Connor Weston was reportedly captured by WikiConference North America 2025 organizers, averting the tragedy, before police officers charged him with criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment.
The Dayton resident apparently paid to attend the four-day conference when he crashed the conference’s opening ceremony at Manhattan Civic Hall at 9 a.m. Friday morning. According to police and various media reports, he jumped onto a scene at the scene, pointed the gun at his head and the ceiling, and expressed a desire to take his own life while declaring himself an “anti-contact, non-criminal pedophile” on a sign hung around his neck.
Conference security team member Richard Knipel rushed to the stage and grabbed Weston from behind amid the chaos, the New York Times reported.
The Times reported that another conference security team member, Andrew Lih, soon went up to help Knipel.
“I grabbed his arm,” Lih told the outlet. “He was still holding his gun pretty tightly. I took his fingers off the gun, took it from his hand, and put it on the ground.”
A police spokesman said officers took Weston into custody after receiving multiple 911 calls. No injuries were reported.
The Times reported that conference attendees thanked Knipel by giving him Barnstars, Wikipedia’s official token of appreciation.
Maryana Iskander, president of the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, reportedly told the crowd that Knipel and Lih were “very busy.” “I thank them for saving my life,” he added.
Knipel works at the City University of New York and his mission is to make his research more publicly available while contributing to Wikipedia and sites related to the famous online encyclopedia selected in real time by volunteers. Fri in March shipped It featured Knipel as the first “Resident Wikemedian” on its website and said its business was funded by philanthropic funds from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.
The Times, meanwhile, described Lih as a digital strategist who works with museums and libraries.
Wikipedia canceled the remaining events of the conference on Friday. The meeting resumed on Saturday.
Friday apparently wasn’t the first time Weston publicly labeled himself an “anti-contact, non-offending pedophile.” A social media video that went viral in July shows a man saying Weston’s name, age and hometown; applying this term to himself; and that he “can choose not to harm minors, but he cannot stop being affected by them.”
The man in the clip looked like Weston in a photo taken Friday of police putting him in the back of a patrol car after his arrest. Both Friday’s photo and the earlier video showed the same “no contact, innocent pedophile” sign.
As NBC News notedJohns Hopkins University defines non-criminal pedophiles as “a unique population of individuals who have a sexual interest in children but, despite common misperceptions, have neither engaged in sexual contact with a child nor accessed materials for the illicit sexual exploitation of children.”
It’s on Wikipedia a rule Editors who “define themselves as pedophiles” are blocked indefinitely and banned from the platform.
