On 01/05/07, Anthony wikilegal@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!]