[WikiEN-l] Looking up death dates in government death records: original research?

[Andrew Gray]

On 01/05/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> > This article, and most of the other
> > Venona-cruft, should be deleted as there is almost no historical
> > context or solid biographical info for any of them, they are just
> > noting a mention in decryption XY4J7 and leaving it at that.
>
> I agree emphatically with this, though I personally wouldn't have a
> problem with a merge and redirect to [[List of Americans in the Venona
> papers]].

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.
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?

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.

[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!]

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk