An examination of the 62,267 changes and additions Joshua Boyle made to Wikipedia before he and his wife were held captive in Afghanistan and his recent arrest on more than a dozen criminal charges reveals persistent activity on terrorism, Nazi women, torture devices, snipers and sex acts including bondage.
Boyle did extensive, perhaps obsessive, work as an avid unpaid contributor to the public-source online encyclopedia on a wide variety of subjects, spending several hours almost every day adding and deleting inform**ation and arguing with other editors for years.
His involvement in Wikipedia started on Oct. 20, 2004, at 5 a.m. when he added information about an obscure Star Wars bootleg from Turkey. That day he created his first Wikipedia profile under the user name Sherurcij with the biography: “Just some 21 year old student that works on Wikipedia in his spare time…”
It turns out he had a lot of spare time.
According to his lengthy user log, providing the time and date of all saved edits, he appears to have often worked nights on entries, including on holidays. On Valentine’s Day in 2005, for instance, he created an entry on an online Star Wars game, added to an entry on a U.S. environmental activist and then on Canadian musician Neil Young.
Later that month Boyle created his first page involving geo-politics about an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip.
His more esoteric interests soon emerged, including a strange attachment to the “Pear of Anguish,” an old implement used as a choking device. In May 2005 he edited pages on foot whipping, chastity belts, cheek kissing and “Facials (sex act)”.
He later added a photo of a female model in a bra wearing a “ring gag”, an antique picture of a dominatrix, and a photo he took of a condom machine.
He edited articles on the Islamic views on anal sex and oral sex. He uploaded a photo, taken by someone else, of a Judas Cradle, a spike-topped stool used for torture.
He divided his attention between that material and his primary public interests of justice, social activism, military history, global atrocities, crime and, eventually, terrorism.
His first input on the subject of terrorism came March 14, 2005, when he made edits to the entry on the Beslan school siege.
That month he also made his first Nazi-themed contributions, creating an entry on a Second World War German general and editing the entry on German Blood Certificates, documents Hitler issued to Germans with Jewish blood.
His activity on Nazis tilted towards Nazi women, creating dozens of pages on females involved in Hitler’s regime.
His edits to the entry on the Branch Davidians, the fringe religious sect wiped out after a siege of a compound in Waco, Tx., seemed to trigger an interest in snipers; he then created and edited many entries on snipers over years.
On New Year’s Eve 2005, shortly before midnight, he edited an entry on “List of events named massacres” and two hours after midnight edited “Foreign hostages in Iraq.”
He became strident with other editors, often reverting entries to the way he had written them after others made changes. He also broke protocol by signing entries he wrote.
Boyle waged an internal Wikipedia fight for a year over the use of gruesome photos of the murdered children of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. He first sought out the images, saying he would be “forever indebted” if someone found them, and then championed their use despite complaints they were “depraved” and “ghastly.” Boyle angrily responded: “Let’s nix the offensively crude depictions of death on crucifix and Jesus Christ as well… btw, this is sarcasm.”
One editor said Boyle’s passion for using multiple images of the children’s bodies left him “extremely worried.” Unwilling to let it go, Boyle amended his Wikipedia signature to “Speaker for the Dead.” The current entry uses none of the photos.
Other controversial photos he added include a 1910 photo of a sexually-abused German boy that an editor quickly deleted saying it was “extreme.” Boyle added it a second time saying “nothing wrong with image.” The photo is not currently in use. He also added photos from the 1940s of examples of human cannibalism.
He upset Wikipedia’s administrators in 2008 by purposely creating a hoax entry and a fake user account to nominate the hoax for Wikipedia’s front page. When spotted, Boyle said it was a “social experiment” to see how quickly false entries were detected.
In defending himself against a ban, he wrote: “I actually put in seven hours of use to the project every weekday, which often involves meeting with, telephoning and writing to the subjects of articles, the Department of Defence, Canadian Members of Parliament and the families of alleged terrorists.”
In 2006 he started amending terrorism entries, doing heavy editing about those charged with the Toronto 18 terror plot.
