On 5/2/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Concur. There's been a lot of very sloppy editorial practices going on wrt those articles, and I'm really not comfortable with having them.
I feel likewise. A bunch of people who have problems with the neutral point of view insist that all this stuff is relevant for an encyclopedia. I think that a list of the nobodies who had tenuous contact with Soviet spy agencies belongs in the source documents or as an appendix in a book on the subject, not as a Wikipedia page.
People of no importance who have been "named" as a spy in some document, but were never caught, never charged, never convicted - and, for all we know, never *did* anything? What possible *use* is that to our readers? What historical significance do these people have?
None, in most cases. I think the point behind these is to inflate the perception of how many Soviet agents were at work in the US in the period indicated. It's like pulling teeth to get these editors to even state which source claims what - probably because there's little substance behind these.
IMO, nobody from the Venona papers should be listed on Wikipedia unless they are independently notable. The thing is that in many cases there is absolutely no information about WHY each person was of interest to Soviet intelligence - whether they were an operative, a contact, someone they were trying to recruit, or merely someone they wanted to watch. The vast majority of these people have no mention except in the Venona archives and in passing mentions in books on the subject. Falls way short of 'multiple non-trivial sources'.
There are books of indices to these decryptions. I don't see any point in duplicating them - and there just isn't the information to do anything else, nor is there ever going to be - but I can see the argument for it; I do contend, though, that it's futile to pretend an index entry leads to independent encyclopedic significance.
Exactly. I think in most cases they should not even appear in list form in the encyclopedia; certainly, they should not without specific sourcing.
[In the specific case - wow, look at the source document. We don't know what she did, but it apparently involved trying to find a missing pregnant girl in Portland. We don't even know if she did anything illegal, if she even *worked* for the NKVD... just that she had a codename and someone asked her to help with something. Not the stuff of which spy thrillers are made - not even the stuff of which interesting local newspaper stories are made. And then we have the temerity to categorise her as a spy, accused or otherwise!]
I note also the POV editors have the duplicity to also claim that being so listed isn't an accusation of everything, but then when you opine that perhaps they should be deleted, then - suddenly it's "They're subversives who fought against the United States, of course they're notable".
-Matt