Talk:Mackenzie Fierceton

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: withdrawn by nominator, closed by BlueMoonset (talk) 15:34, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that after Mackenzie Fierceton's mother was arrested and charged with abusing her, she was accused of staging the incident so she could get into an Ivy League school? Source: "There were rumors that Mackenzie’s bruises were self-inflicted, that she had thrown herself down the stairs to get attention. Some people said that she had been inspired by the movie 'Gone Girl,' about a woman who stages her own murder ... Once, at the airport, Smith ran into another Whitfield parent, who commented that “Mackenzie wanted to go to an Ivy League school, and this was her way in.'", "How an Ivy League School Turned Against A Student", The New Yorker; April 4, 2022.
  • ALT1: ... that Mackenzie Fierceton believes her mother or her family leaked the information that led to her withdrawal from the Rhodes Scholarship she had been awarded? Source: "It referred to childhood pictures—enclosed in a twenty-two-page letter written to the Rhodes Trust, in mid-December, by an anonymous sender who displayed a great deal of familiarity with Mackenzie’s childhood—that showed Mackenzie engaging in 'typical upper middle-class childhood activities,' like horseback riding and going to the beach.", The New Yorker. "' And how much confidence do you have that that anonymous complainer was Carrie, your biological mother?' 'You know, I honestly don’t know. My understanding is there were two anonymous emails. One of them, to me, felt pretty clear that it was probably from someone in my biological family, because it had photos of me; it had very specific information that very few people would have — and I don’t think many people would have random childhood photos of me.'" Deconstructed podcast, The Intercept; April 16, 2022
  • ALT2: ... that in a lawsuit Mackenzie Fierceton filed against Penn, she accuses the university of casting doubt on her allegations of child abuse by her mother to discredit her testimony in another lawsuit? Source: "Summons and Verified Complaint", pp. 9–13, Fierceton v. Winkelstein et al; December 21, 2021
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/History of the Jews in Innsbruck

Moved to mainspace by Daniel Case (talk). Self-nominated at 06:14, 11 June 2022 (UTC).

• Comment (not a full review). All of these hooks are problematic with respect to DYK rule 4a, which generally is interpreted as not allowing hooks that highlight negative material about living people. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:47, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: While that's a slight simplification of Rule 4a (it says hooks that focus unduly on negative information about living people should be avoided, and in an instance like this all three hooks reflect a significant part of the reason for the subject's notability, I think you do have one of your infrequent points here, and that at the very least a reviewer should have a choice. So, herewith ...

• ALT3... that Mackenzie Fierceton withdrew from the Rhodes Scholarship program, but is still studying at Oxford since a sympathetic Penn professor is paying her tuition?Source: "Last fall, Mackenzie began the sociology Ph.D. program at Oxford, which had admitted her before she withdrew from the Rhodes; she’d lost her funding, but a professor at Penn offered to pay for her first year.", The New Yorker

That good enough for you, Dave? Maybe you could be a lamb and approve it, sending it on its merry way? I'd remember it if you did. Daniel Case (talk) 02:33, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

• Full review needed. BlueMoonset (talk) 16:21, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

• This has been open for a month now, possibly because the article in question is really long, and, no offense, a bit hard to follow, while the submitter is an admin. So rejecting it could cause issues. Yet ... I will rush in where angels fear to tread!

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

• Adequate sourcing:
• Neutral: - No, I'm afraid. The article concentrates way too much on Fierceton's point of view, quoting her words, quoting her diary, her journal, describing her feelings, etc. Since the accusations against her are of lying, putting that much emphasis on her direct words is highly problematic. Also way too many paragraphs are sourced to only the New Yorker article, I stopped counting non-trivial, even long, paragraphs with a single [2] at the end when I hit 25. Now the New Yorker is a fine source, but it's one source, and in an article describing a dispute, or multiple disputes, which this is (it took me a while to figure this out! See below), we really need multiple sources for the main points to make sure we are proportionally covering all major points of view.
• Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing: - Not really. The Earwig report is just terrible, 90% similarity to the New Yorker article, 83.7% similarity to the Intercept, 65% similarity to the Chronicle. Now I know you didn't intentionally copyvio, but it seems to be triggering on the direct quotes that are in all of these articles that you're using. Honestly, we don't need most of those quotes. For example, "Family is not the people you are related to by blood," she wrote in the diary. "They are the people that support you, look out for you, & love you unconditionally. By those standards, the standards of real family, not one person I'm related to by blood meets those requirements or even comes close." I will be shocked if 50% of diary-keeping teenagers haven't written a very similar sentence; that could be a stereotypical "moody teen rumination". And the structure of our article, at least the first half, could map 1-1 with the New Yorker article, that is also a problem.
• Other problems: - Wikipedia:Did_you_know#DYK_rules number 4 "Articles must meet the neutral point of view policy. Articles ... that ... promote one side of an ongoing dispute should be avoided."

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: As above, it took me a while to figure out what this article was about! It starts with "Mackenzie Fierceton (née Mackenzie Terrell on August 9, 1997; later Mackenzie Morrison,[1]: 63–64, 86 ) is an American activist and graduate student currently studying at Oxford University." To which my response was - yeah, so? What makes her notable? I started looking through the article for her being notable as an activist. Nope. Notable as an exceptional student. Nope. I read the first half of the article which is about her being abused by her mom - very sad, but not really a reason for notability in itself; there are, unfortunately, a large number of children that were abused by their parents, and relatively few get Wikipedia articles because of this. I had to go to the references section and there it was, right in the titles,

• "How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student"
• "Student loses Rhodes scholarship over allegations of lying about her foster care upbringing"
• "Former St. Louis-area student loses Rhodes scholarship over 'false narratives'".
• "Student Misleads With Story of Poverty and Abuse and Wins Rhodes Scholarship—Now, the Media Is Defending Her".
• "'Rhodes Scholar' claimed she grew up poor and abused — then her story started to unravel"

There, that's why she's notable. Not for being an activist and an Oxford student, but for feuding with a school and/or getting a Rhodes scholarship on debatable pretext. That's what our article should be about, and honestly, that wheat is hidden among the chaff of diaries and emotions. It's easily halfway down the article before we get there, and when we do the article is not clear that we have arrived. I'd recommend deleting half of the article text, if not three quarters, otherwise it just doesn't convey what it's really about clearly enough. (Also note - that first headline? That's the New Yorker piece; favorable to her. The others are clearly much less favorable. By using the New Yorker piece so much, we're not using them proportionally.)

"Long" and "buries the lead" are not DYK rejection reasons, so if you keep it like that, I could still accept, but the other bits, the part about leaning too heavily on the single New Yorker article, and telling too much of the story via Fierceton's hotly contested point of view, are; and I suspect, or maybe just hope, that fixing that will involve deleting most of the text, and making the article easier to comprehend. "Just the facts, Ma'am," as Joe Friday is reputed to have said. Keep It Simple, Sir. The New Yorker is a wonderful literary magazine, but we're an encyclopedia, and this is one of the cases where using a beautiful, emotional, human interest New Yorker story, with Gilmore Girls and Gone Girl media references (?!?) to base the structure of a concise factual encyclopedia article around is not working. Sorry. GRuban (talk) 16:49, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

After reading this review yesterday I was almost physically sick for a while.

But after I regained my composure, I began to recall that even while I was writing this article I had occasionally had reservations about whether nominating it for DYK was a good idea. I went ahead anyway. I should have listened to those reservations.

Writing this article was, I do not exaggerate, a BLP nightmare. We have to deal with the fact that Carrie Morrison has run the table legally in being cleared of the allegations that she seriously abused her own daughter to the point of multiple hospitalizations, material that under most circumstances would be game, set and match in casting her as a wronged innocent; yet at the same time her daughter has enough credible, on-the-record witnesses in a position to know on her side supporting those allegations that to leave them out of the article, or minimize them, in the interests of balance would also come at the expense of the article being truly fair. Add to that allegations of sexual abuse against someone for whom BRDP still applies, two reports by respected institutions casting doubt on her credibility (but with similar doubt cast on their motivations and the resulting thoroughness of the reports), and you will understand that at times I found writing this stressful enough to take long breaks. I honestly found it more challenging, both as a writer and personally, than any story I wrote for any of the newspapers I worked for.

I believe that to be fair, the article had to be written at some length (it did get longer, much longer, than I thought it would) with as much of the material included, including direct quotes from the people involved (not just Fierceton), to give everything the appropriate context. For instance, that passage you dismiss as a "moody teen rumination", while it may seem that way in isolation, demonstrates that her alienation from her entire biological family had been going on for some time before the incident that landed her in foster care, much less before she got to Penn, making it more understandable that she'd consider herself first-generation and go to the lengths of creating a new last name for herself, in contrast to the Rhodes Trust report's insinuation that she did it to obfuscate her true past.

I must say that I am grimly amused that here the article is accused of being biased in Fierceton's favor, when some recent edits have held it biased in favor of her mother and Penn (one even going to the BLP Noticeboard to plead that case). No, I am not going to fall into the facile trap of suggesting that getting criticism from both sides means the article is fair, but at the same time I think that suggests that perhaps some readers are not starting to read the article from the point of view of having an open mind.

Perhaps, I see it implied in your review, I should have written this article focusing on the controversy, as an event and not a biography. Maybe. But it's a complicated "event" story. Is it just about her withdrawing from her Rhodes scholarship over allegations she had misled the trust about her background? No, because we can't write about that without going back into the alleged abuse incidents and what both Rhodes and Penn concluded are narratives too credible to comfortably assign truth to either. Then there is Penn's investigation and the sanctions it placed on her (now mostly withdrawn). There is the potentially very costly lawsuit that she helped foment against Penn, giving rise to the allegations that the university's real goal in investigating her so thoroughly was to discredit her as a witness against the university in that lawsuit—allegations that are at the heart of Fierceton's own lawsuit against Penn.

It's a hot mess, one not done justice (ahem) by an article ostensibly focused on a controversial scholarship award. Much better, I felt, to make it a biography given the length of Fierceton's life it was necessary to write about.

And besides there's a lot of notability in that. As she notes in the Intercept interview, rich white girls are in our society not supposed to be physically abused by their parents to the point of prolonged hospital stays and placements in foster care. If they are, their parents are not supposed to be respected career professionals without any known history of drinking, drug use or mental health issues. And if that happens, the abuser is not supposed to be the rich white girl's mother. And even then, one would not expect her to have actually been arrested. Lastly, most parents arrested on felony abuse charges rarely get the exoneration trifecta of having the charges dropped, the arrest expunged, and the state ordered to take them off its abuser registry. All these things would probably make Mackenzie Fierceton notable even if she had never been to college, much less an Ivy League school where she won a Rhodes scholarship, once they were reported in reliable secondary sources.

I do not feel that, as a Wikipedian, I can in good conscience make the changes your review would suggest are necessary to get this to the Main Page. What I realize I knew during the weeks I had this article in draftspace was that the standards of BLP and NPOV as applied and enforced in the rigid and dogmatic way they are here at DYK (with some necessity, I fully agree) would be incompatible with writing this article as I knew it had to be written. I should have known—in fact, I did—that this would end up with me here writing something like this. And I, in particular, am not so desperate for DYKs that I would do anything to get another one.

There is only one Wikipedian to work with that I would know and trust enough to understand what we needed to say when considering rewriting something as complex and controversial as this, and she's dead.

So, therefore, I am withdrawing this nomination, something I very rarely do and for the first time here do entirely of my own volition. I now understand that it is enough, indeed more than enough, to know that by researching and writing this article I forestalled someone else with less experience from writing a shorter, more superficial and by extension more biased and problematic article (and yes, this would have happened). Some of our articles (and IMO this is not the only one) serve the goals of the project best by not being submitted for any sort of community recognition.

That said, I allow that it is possible, per my reflections above on whether this would have worked better as an article about the controversy, that this is an imperfect article (or an article seen as imperfect) because the subject, or at least the available knowledge on it, is imperfect. The best thing to do may be to let the lawsuits play out and see what further information, if any, comes to light through those processes. Daniel Case (talk) 19:22, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. I also miss Sarah (SlimVirgin). --GRuban (talk) 19:33, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

Category

Minor thing, but per article text, WP:CATDEF and WP:CATLGBT, should Category:Queer women be there? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:28, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

In "Personal life", it is sourced that she identifies as queer. Daniel Case (talk) 18:10, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes. And per linked WP-guidance, that is rather weak content to hang the category on. It's not meant for queer-tagging. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:20, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

May not be very relevant for this article, but there is a template at Category:Queer people. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:30, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Tone, content and style issues

The overall tone and style of this article are not presented in a matter-of-fact style. The style is more narrative and dramatic. This does not read like an encyclopedia article. Its tone is close to that of the cited New Yorker article from which much of the source material of this article is drawn. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/mackenzie-fierceton-rhodes-scholarship-university-of-pennsylvania. The Gilmore girls reference borrowed from the New Yorker article is inappropriate, as mapping people to character archetypes to help the reader see a chosen narrative in the facts is inappropriate. The fact that the pediatrician regretted not examining her bruises is not relevant. This is not Dateline. The goal of a Wikipedia article is not to be compelling or gripping. The bit about the angry mob in the St. Louis Dispatch comments is also irrelevant. The close adherence to chronological order - "That evening", "A week later" reflects the narrative slant of the article about a story unfolding in time. The article needs to be substantially edited in a way that divorces its content, tone and style from that of the New Yorker article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gadget142 (talk • contribs) 00:51, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree to a large extent. I felt at times whilst reading it that I was reading longform journalism of sorts. I have begun editing this article in order to reduce the emotional content, excise irrelevant and dramatic details, and sort out the proper facts and narratives presented by the various sources. It is inappropriate for a Wikipedia article to be written in this manner. The article's goal should not be to bring justice to either Fierceton or her mother (which, I feel that, the article as of now, does not attempt to representatively reconcile the sources in any way, except to create a sort of narrative ambiguity), but to show what the facts are. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 17:16, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

As the primary creator of this article, I would like to ask you could really go with anything more than "narrative ambiguity". Sometimes we are faced with situations where reliable sources writing about a living person produce a great deal of content that favors one side of a narrative over another. Carrie Morrison has not bothered to comment on this story anymore than she's already quoted; we can and do mention that a court cleared her arrest record, the charge was dropped and that she was removed from the state child-abuse registry by a judge who declined to say whether the abuse happened or not, just that the state didn't offer enough to prove it in the absence of a criminal conviction. And we cannot say any more than that; the reader can infer what they like. It is impossible to reconcile the sources without going into OR territory.

I am also a little surprised you wrote what you wrote above after having rewritten the intro to focus exclusively on this incident, removing the material in the first graf that recounted the facts of her life leading up to the abuse (alleged or not) and Penn. If you think this should be rewritten to be an article about the controversy, I might be willing to read your arguments. Daniel Case (talk) 23:49, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

My primary contention is that the ambiguity is framed in a way that is emotionally charged and narratively layered, not that it exists. As @Gadget142 points out, attention is given to small details for seemingly no reason other than to create suspense. What I had meant by reconciliation was to say that the structure of the article gives rise to the dramatic character of this narrative, instead of summarising and presenting facts in an encyclopaedic way. Don't get me wrong, the article is good, but I think the focus must be cut more to the bone. I'd add that the only reason why she's notable, from the sources, is the controversy in the first place. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 02:13, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

On the rewritten lead, I don't believe that there are any differences in substance than the first one. Almost all the same facts are present; I feel that it's more of a stylistic copyedit, so I'm unsure why you reverted it @Daniel Case. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 02:20, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, to me it was substantive. When I wrote this article as a biography, I believed we had to tell it that way, so the intro would make clear that this was about her and her life, not just what happened with her Rhodes scholarship and why.

With the benefit of a year-plus, I can begin to see how maybe the article is more about the controversy and it is hard to establish any notability outside of it (unless you argue that having the Rhodes revoked is enough to make someone notable (has it ever happened to anyone else? I think it might have, but not for a while)).

My real problem with reworking the article into one about the controversy is I can't imagine what to call it . But doing so, I think, would address some of the concerns people have raised here ... we wouldn't need to rely on the New Yorker article as much, for one thing. Daniel Case (talk) 03:17, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it's contradictory to portray Fierceton's life whilst still acknowledging that the crux of her notability is upon the controversy. I don't think we have to rename the article, because I do think that this is meant to be a biography of her life; at the very least, her activism relating to Black Lives Matter and the wrongful death lawsuits has at least some notability outside of her controversy. Her life until now has been so short that it would be difficult to discuss anything other than the Penn controversy. To use an analogy, it's like if we had a biography of Joe Biden while he was a somewhat newly elected senator. The lead would have to centre about, mostly, his senate race and contributions, and addressing his early life in some detail. Which is what I attempted to do in the new lead, and which I felt the old lead spent too many words focusing upon specific early details, like which high school she was from, etc.

In regards to style, one example I take issue with is: "By the end of the interview Fierceton was crying. Her mentor told Licht afterwards that "it felt like an attack on a student" and that she had never experienced anything like it. Fierceton wrote to SP2 dean Sara Bachman complaining about the interview, saying she felt "worthlessness, hopelessness, and shame" for a week afterwards." I feel that this is too long and makes too extensive use of direct quotes, mainly because quotations are done consistently throughout, and in my opinion with little encyclopaedic effect other than to emotionally represent the various individuals involved. I believe that, much of this should be cut down, and made more succinct and encyclopaedic. I would be happy to work on a new lead here and discuss other stylistic aspects. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 04:02, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

@Daniel Case

My major contentions with the current lead are that:

(1) it does not reference the crux of notability of Fierceton (i.e. the scandal) until the fourth paragraph. The second paragraph begins with how she documented the abuse - but being a documenter or communicator of her abuse is not what she is known for. The scandal, preceding events, and subsequent response and lawsuit, as well as her post-scandal activism, are the crux of what a reader wants to know through the lead of this page.

(ii) it contains extraneous details about her personal life. Particularly with the reference to the "guardian ad idem", repeated mentions of the high school she went to, who is paying for her Oxford tuition, etc.

(iii) the phrasing of some statements are somewhat charged and flamboyant: "Commentators took the university and American elite higher education to task for...", "a sympathetic Penn faculty member paid her Oxford tuition", "Supporters of Fierceton's mother called Mackenzie an emotionally manipulative girl who would injure herself and fabricate abuse indicators to be an appealing candidate for admission to an Ivy League college such as the University of Pennsylvania."

How do you feel about this draft, which I feel preserves her "story", whilst cutting down on the excess prose, and still highlighting what Fierceton is known for:

Mackenzie Fierceton (born Mackenzie Terrell on August 9, 1997; later Mackenzie Morrison,) is an American activist and graduate student currently studying at Oxford University. Raised in Chesterfield, Missouri, a West County suburb of St. Louis, she attended and graduated from the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur. She received a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as Penn), on a full scholarship, through a combined five-year program.

Beginning in 2021, Fierceton became embroiled in a scandal with Penn over the representation of her background in her university applications. In her applications to Penn, and later the Rhodes Scholarship, Fierceton stated that she was sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend; was physically abused by her mother to the point of hospitalisation; and had lived in foster care for a number of years. She also identified as a first-generation low-income (FGLI) student due to her lack of financial support, as a result of parental estrangement. An investigation by the Rhodes Trust and Penn concluded that she failed to correct statements and impressions made in her application essays, particularly in regard to the severity of abuse, nature of her upbringing, and duration of foster care. Additionally, Penn threatened to withold Fierceton's degrees, fine her, and refer her to criminal prosecution. She later withdrew from the Rhodes Scholarship, filing suit against Penn for the infliction of emotional distress.

Although fellow students and faculty at her high school noticed signs of abuse displayed by Fierceton, her mother denied all allegations and claimed that Fierceton lied for her own personal benefit. She had been hospitalized twice in 2014 for injuries, including concussions and bruised ribs, which she attributes to her mother. After the second stay, which lasted three weeks, state officials placed her in foster care and arrested her mother under child abuse charges, which were later dropped. Missouri state courts later expunged the arrest and removed her mother from the state's child-abuser registry.

Penn eventually awarded Fierceton her degrees, but a notation about the investigative finding remains in her transcript. In Fierceton's lawsuit, she alleges that their investigation was done to discredit her as a witness in a wrongful death suit filed against the university which Fierceton instigated. Her supporters at Penn have called for the university's acting provost, Beth Winkelstein, to be held accountable for her role in the investigation, characterizing it as a continuation of her abuse. In early 2022, her struggle with Penn and the Rhodes Trust gained national attention through stories run in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New Yorker. Commentators criticised the university and American elite higher education to their use of Fierceton and other recent Rhodes recipients as poverty porn, and for their shifting definitions of FGLI students. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 08:15, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

I have no problem with this other than it being one graf longer than INTROLENGTH prescribes. I also feel it's better if, as I am more and more thinking we should, we convert the article from a biography to an account of the controversy. Daniel Case (talk) 05:39, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

References

April 2024 redrafting of article

I've just performed a major restructuring of the article. I'm explaining my changes here.

I found several problems with the previous version, which other editors also discussed above. These included:

• The introduction was overly long.
• The article was excessively detailed and did not succintly summarise the events (insufficently encyclopaedic).
• Much of the content was paraphrased from the New Yorker article, and presented in the same order.
  • This contributed to the excessive level of detail and gave the appearance of OR (it's not necessarily, because it was just repeating the thesis of the NYer, but it looked like it).
• The amount of text in the footnotes was excessive (1,900 words, or 20% of the article wordcount).
  • The use of footnotes felt like it was to give the impression of blow-by-blow responses to the New Yorker article. The whole juxtaposition--repeating the NYer whole cloth then Penn's responses in footnotes--begins to stray into OR.

Overall the article should be an encyclopaedic summary of events based on sources. Given this is a BLP I felt extra care was warrented, especially over presenting allegations and counter-allegations of abuse, injury, and ongoing legal action in a neutral way. Therefore, I have been bold and implemented the following changes:

I have overhauled the article to be much more succint, removing extraneous detail (interested readers are welcome to go to the sources for a greater level of detail than they would get in an encyclopaedia entry), and reordered events into a chronology (previously the sections followed the dramatic-reveal style of the new yorker article, covering the wrongful death lawsuit out of order).

I have removed all the footnotes. Where relevant I have incorporated them into the text, but most were to too high a level of detail.

I brought together a new section from media coverage section on the debates enkindled in the press re FGLI and poverty porn. There may be some work still needed on this section. It is probably still relevant as the ensuing debate is probably a large part of this article is notable.

Overall I have tried to be cautious and neutral with descriptions of the controvers(y/ies) and follow the guidance from WP:BLPSTYLE. JCrue (talk) 14:46, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Please remember to use American English when writing about an American subject. Americans do not "read" subjects in college; we major in them. Daniel Case (talk) 04:24, 3 April 2024 (UTC)