Douglas Blair, a columnist for The Daily Signal and a graduate of Heritage's Young Leaders Program, wrote an op-ed for the Christian Post on what he saw as Wikipedia's disservice to victims of Marx's flawed ideology in their removal of anything deemed anti-communist.
"A spectre is haunting Europe - the specter of communism," he wrote on Tuesday.
Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto" has been cited as the inspiration for some of the worst tyrants in history, including Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.
"And Wikipedia doesn't want you to know about communism's legacy of death and ruin," Blair said.
There is a notice at the top of the Wikipedia article for "Mass killings under communist regimes," warning users that the page "is being considered for deletion" for a variety of reasons, citing neutral concerns and "factual inaccuracies."
There is still a discussion over the page's future, despite the removal of the notice at the top. Nonetheless, an additional disclaimer claims that the page continues to have many difficulties.
Blair cited examples from the internal discussion around the proposal to indicate that at least one Wikipedia editor, a 25-year-old Italian named Davide King, had been revising the article to minimize the suffering caused by cruel communist governments. King included communist excuses into the paper, including the following attack on the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a leading communism teaching organization. It reads as follows:
"The victims of communism narrative, as popularized by and named after the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, has become accepted scholarship as part of the double genocide theory in Eastern Europe and among anti-communists in general. However, it is rejected by most Western European and other scholars. Some scholars say it's politically motivated, oversimplified and trivializes the Holocaust for equating communism with it, positing a communist or red Holocaust."
Some Wiki editors objected to the use of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation as a source because of perceived bias. One editor advised eliminating any references to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation from the article.
"While the [Black Book of Communism] discussion is underway ... I propose that all references to the Victims of Communism [Memorial Foundation] to be stripped in the meantime," commented a Wiki contributor called Dark-World25.
Blair also highlighted another editor who was taking aim at both the blog of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and that of the Heritage Foundation.
However, there is another side to this story that Wikipedia authors should be aware of, he said, pointing out the harm that communist rulers caused on their subjects.
Furthermore, Big Tech has become more confident in its ability to restrict information that they find undesirable, he said, noting that comprehensive online encyclopedia such as Wikipedia has a significant impact on the distribution of information.
"Wikipedia's efforts to delete the article represent a dangerous combination of censorship and communist apologia," he said. "And given the fact that the specter of communism still represents a global threat, Wikipedia's willingness to sanitize the evil philosophy represents a dire threat."
Blair, however, remarked that Wikipedia appeared to stopped the removal of the article. Even so, he cautioned against becoming complacent against it.
"Wikipedia's actions do a disservice to those victims of Marx's failed philosophy. It is up to us to guard their memories so that the atrocities of communism stay buried in the past where they belong," he concluded.
