Template:Did you know nominations/Mackenzie Fierceton

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The result was: withdrawn by nominator, closed by BlueMoonset (talk) 15:34, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

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Mackenzie Fierceton

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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)


  • 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

Policy compliance:

  • Adequate sourcing: Yes
  • Neutral: No - 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: No - 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: No - 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
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)
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