Talk:Kaycee Nicole

Related links

I've noticed that various links to old newspaper articles are no longer online. I've added some other sources, including links to articles still in the "Wayback Machine" archive. • Sbmeirow • Talk • 03:21, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

• Internet sleuths trace teen's tragic tale to Peabody; Peabody-Gazette; 2001, archive.org (text copy of original article)
• Jon Carroll column; San Francisco Chronicle; June 5, 2001, archive.org
• Don’t Believe the Type; The New York Times; May 31, 2001
• A Beautiful Life, an Early Death, a Fraud Exposed; The New York Times; May 31, 2001
• Debating Reality: An Online Hoax Is Not a Pox; The New York Times; June 14, 2001
• Kaycee chronicles: life, death, deception; St. Petersburg Times; June 3, 2001
• Chapter in Dan Gillmor's "We the Media" book describing the case. See page 187. Trolls, Spin, and the Boundaries of Trust (PDF article)
• Article about online hoaxes (with photo of Kaycee)
• Swenson's family webpage in 1999, archive.org

Basketball Player

Does anyone know the basketball player used to portray Nicole? Apparently the basketball player nows plays college ball. -RomeW 08:51, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Never mind, I found it. The Metafile site lists a first name- "Julie" and says that the last name should be "discretely used", but it's easy to find her last name, her statistics and where she went to school- Southern Nazarene University- so I'm wondering how much of that information should be used here. I'm also curious if we should include a picture (you can still find useable Kaycee Nicole pictures), and which one? -RomeW 09:33, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

According to a comment on museum of hoaxes Julie died in 2005 - is there any proof of this? PMA 06:05, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Misc

not compu-stub, there is no hoax-stub, fictional so not person-stub, not exactly history-stub...what kind of stub? RJFJR 23:04, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)

Metafilter's participation in the outing should be noted here somewhere - but not by me, as it's before my time. --John Kenneth Fisher 00:28, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

Here, have some links. - EurekaLott 02:21, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

I recall a very informative letter written by BigWhiteGuy or someone (the hoster of Kaycee's blog who was deceived) which contradicted some of the theories (or at least one) on this article, but I'm too lazy to find it.

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Kaycee Nicole/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: —Tom Morris (talk) 16:10, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

   Scare quotes can be overused, but mostly that has been fixed. For articles on topics like these, it might be an idea to avoid them altogether. For instance, I edited out '"her" hospitalization'. There is no doubt that the persona is female; the problem is that it is a persona. Otherwise, the prose is fine, and by the time I reached the beginning of the section on the unraveling of the hoax, I was actually quite eager to find out what happened!

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   No OR concerns. A few of the references are to user-generated content sites like Kuro5hin and Metafilter but it would be hard to discuss the story without linking to those. They are backed up by links to more traditional sources that back up the assertions.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   No problems. The subject is clearly defined, it's not like it is "List of famous things from the twentieth century" so staying focussed is not a difficult.

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

   Hard to think of how it could not follow NPOV. Again, it's not a controversial topic (although the syndrome itself may be).

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

   No edit warring or other disruption listed in the revision history.

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   Obviously very difficult to get images for this kind of article. As there are no articles available,

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

   Everything checks out okay to me.

External links modified

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Is this actually notable?

If it is notable, then why is there no explanation why in the article? There have been thousands of fake online people and deaths, before and after this, so why have a page on one in particular? I think someone needs to either establish some sort of notability or the page should go, regardless of having been GA'd. SilverbackNet ^talk 05:53, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

RfC: AfD? Notability, possible violations of BLP, pseudoscience

Article about an alias attributed to to a living person with sourcing to claim a she invented a fake persona. Claims of a diagnosis of Munchausen by internet which doesn't exist - there is no "by internet" version. One source states "In another case, a sort of Munchausen syndrome by proxy by Internet, a woman used the fictional persona of a young student (“Kaycee”)". Medical stuff fails to meet WP:MEDRS. Amousey (they/them pronouns) (talk) 23:09, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi Amousey. Can you talk a little more about what specific content (if any) you're disagreeing with in this article? That is, what BLP violations do you see? Where are the weak spots of notability you believe are there? I understand you are contending that there really isn't such a thing as Munchausen by internet, but that's sort of a peripheral issue to the notability and BLP qualities of this article, and if there are notability and BLP weaknesses, those are what we should focus on to improve the article. As for MEDRS, I'm not deeply familiar with those standards, so can you go into a little more detail about where the problems are in that domain, too? A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 21:44, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

The article is about an alias of a BLP who is named, and given a mental illness diagnosis by non-medical sources ie people she wasn't a patient on and one of those is a journalist. Surely that's a BLP violation? Secondly there's also issue of notability. Why have no page for the person but one for an alias she allegedly briefly used. The sourcing for her admitting it is a blog which doesn't meet BLP standards. The page comes across as a character attack on a living person who isn't notable. There's no neutrality. Amousey (they/them pronouns) (talk) 23:48, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

I'll open by saying that having written much of this article, and more, having been interested in this incident for quite a long time, I'm probably not the most neutral party to be reviewing these concerns, because of course I would think what I wrote is serviceable and that a topic that caught my interest is notable. So I'm going to ask for opinions from anyone else who might be looking at this page, too, please.

That said, my take on your concerns is:

• "given a mental illness diagnosis by non-medical sources" - I'm not sure the article is actually doing this. It seems like it's giving a descriptor (Munchausen by internet) that is itself (in its article) defined as a "pattern of behavior" rather than as a medical condition. And it's citing reliable sources for that descriptor being applied to this case. I would absolutely agree with you if the article said something like "Swenson suffered from Munchausen by internet" or "Swenson was diagnosed [by this journalist] as having Munchausen by internet", but I don't think the article is saying or implying that. Instead it's saying "this incident where someone faked an identity was a case of [this pattern of behavior]." I'd be interested to hear others' opinions on this, though, particularly now that Munchausen by internet is at AfD.
• "Surely that's a BLP violation?" - Well, WP:BLP doesn't say that we can't say negative things about someone who's alive. It says that "All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be supported by an inline citation to a reliable, published source." In this case, the statement about Munchausen by internet is supported by a citation to the New York Times (treated by Wikipedia as a reliable source) and one to the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (which sounds pretty reliable to me, though perhaps you know otherwise?). Other BLP concerns might involve whether the information is disproportionately covered in the article and whether the information is neutral, but again I'd argue that in the case of this article, neither of those is an issue - the information is one clause of one sentence in a much larger article, and it's presented neutrally rather than as "an evil person did an evil thing". You could argue that using the term "Munchausen by internet" is inherently non-neutral because that's not a valid psychiatric diagnosis, but that brings us back to the first bullet and me counter-arguing that the article doesn't claim any diagnosis.
• "Why have no page for the person but one for an alias she allegedly briefly used." - exactly because the alias is notable but the person behind it is not. It would be inappropriate under BLP to have an article about Debbie Swenson, because she's not notable. No one wrote NYT or Wired articles about Debbie Swenson or her "death". Digging into Debbie Swenson's birth, early life, marriage, etc would not be acceptable because there's no sources for that and its not relevant to the topic at hand. But reliable sources did write about the Kaycee Nicole hoax, making the hoax notable even though the person is not.
• "The sourcing for her admitting it is a blog which doesn't meet BLP standards." - Maybe you're looking somewhere different than I am, but when I look at the article I see the following as sources for the admission: The New York Times, The Sunday Telegraph, the Topeka Capital-Journal, Wired, and Kuro5hin (dead link). I'm not so sure about Kuro5hin with it being dead, but all the rest of those are reliable sources that would meet the requirements of BLP. I wouldn't object to removing the sentence cited to Kuro5hin if you think that's called for.

I'm very sympathetic to BLP concerns, but in this case I basically think everything that would potentially be problematic is sufficiently sourced and neutrally presented. Looking forward to getting some other opinions, though. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 20:46, 7 July 2020 (UTC)