Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nick Bottom


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result was keep. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 10:45, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Nick Bottom
The entire article is essentially a lengthy plot summary. A decent summary of the play exists already in the A Midsummer Night's Dream article, there's no need to branch out unnecessary detail into separate character articles. Also, take note that the character does not have substantial notability outside of Shakespeare, and I fail to see even enough notability as a character in the play to warrant an individual article. Calgary 19:56, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I am also nominating the following related pages for deletion, as they too are primarily plot summaries, and fail to satisfy the notability guidelines:



Calgary 20:08, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Withdraw all Yeah, so I've read over the whole discussion, thought about it, and it does seem that my original nomination was a bit erroneous. While the state of most of these articles is indeed terrible, it seems that they satisfy the notability requirements, either individually or as part of a collective, and that there is information with which the articles can be expanded. Other issues may exist, but they are of the sort that can be settled without deletion. Sorry to put you all through this, in the future I'll put more thought into any nominations I may make. Calgary 22:42, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong Delete All Wikipedia is not Sparknotes™ Rackabello 20:11, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep Please don't be so hasty. These articles can easily be expanded more than it may seem on the surface. Take the Rosaline article, for example, a GA. Rosaline is a character in Romeo and Juliet who is never seen and has no speaking parts.  Compared to other Shakespearean characters, her importance is miniscule.  However, since so much is written about Shakespeare and his plays, quite a bit of information could be gathered and a good article was put together.  This was largely a test to see whether other, similar articles, such as these could be expanded.  It has been proven that they can.  Another article that has been expanded this way is Sycorax (Shakespeare), another unseen character in Shakespeare's The Tempest. This article was once a mere summary on a disambig page. The characters you have listed all have appearances and speaking parts in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and would thus probably have even more scholarly information about them. Clearly, the answer then is to expand, not to delete. Wrad 20:20, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete all. WP:FICTION says that minor characters (with very rare exceptions) do not merit their own articles. Clarityfiend 20:38, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment I believe that these are all exceptions, as it has been shown in my above comment that even the most minor Shakespeare character has more than enough scholarly comment to merit his or her own article. Can you say this for any other fiction author?  Probably not. Clearly this is the exception. Wrad 20:41, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Shakespeare is arguably the most highly regarded and most frequently studied writer in history, so I agree that Shakespearean characters would likely merit exception, but still we must review everything on a case-by-case basis. Shakespearean characters do not have inherent notability, and while there are under certain circumstances cases in which minor characters may be worthy of their own article, this is certainly not universally applicable. Surely you can't say that a character like Egeus or Philostrate has the same notability and is subject to the same amount of literary analysis as Rosaline. Yes, there are exceptions, and those exceptions may occur more frequently within the works of someone like Shakespeare, but when judging whether a case merits exception, we must judge it fairly and independently of other articles. If someone can establish that all of these characters have notability, and are frequent subjects of substantial literary analysis, that would be a very reasonable justification for keeping them. If not, the fact that other minor Shakespearean characters are notable enough to have their own articles is irrelevant. Calgary 20:53, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I disagree. Rosaline is probably the least notable of Shakespeare's characters.  I could easily say that "a character like Egeus or Philostrate has the same notability and is subject to the same amount of literary analysis as Rosaline." Someone just needs to expand these articles on a case by case basis, not delete them.  Give them the benefit of the doubt. Wrad 21:39, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Giving an article the benefit of the doubt is probably the worst approach to take on Wiipedia. Let's take a look at Philostrate, for example. Philostrate appears in two scenes, and has around five lines. His connection to the plot is minimal, if not nonexistant. So how do you propose we expand the article? Or what about the article on Peter Quince, or Snout, how may those be expanded? I have to say, ignoring a significant lack of notability in favor of the idea that because they're Shakespearean characters they're "probably notable", even though fact says otherwise is a very bad idea. Calgary 21:57, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Watch me do the impossible, then. I'll try to expand what I can in the next few days. I may be wrong, but I doubt it. If I can't find anything, then it probably isn't out there. Wrad 22:07, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I just did a simple search among scholarly books and found a good amount on Nick Bottom, Egeus, and Philostrate already. I'm sure plenty more will be found easily with little effort. Look forward to some expansion. Wrad 22:22, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Merge all to Characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream and prune mercilessly for grade school lit. crit. and original research. There are several books and book-length works on the characters Hamlet and Falstaff.  There will never be a book about Philostrate: he and the other nominations fail to meet WP:FICT.  The nominator's rationale(WP:NOT) seems a bit irrelevant to me. — mholland (talk) 21:15, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep most but delete Egeus and Philostrate. I'm fairly sure that reliable academic sources could be found for each of the lovers and the Rude Mechanicals, but Egeus and Philostrate are so minor that they almost certainly wouldn't have sufficient sources. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 00:10, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment Please take a look at the recent changes to the two articles, especially Philostrate. Egeus is a bit trickier, not because there is so little about him, but because there is so much.  Beyond being a character in Dream, he is also in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Ovid's Metamorphoses, to name just a few.  I'm trying to figure how I'm going to reorganize it. We may want to turn it into a redirect and merge it with Aegeus. Wrad 00:14, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I disagree about a redirect from Egeus to Aegeus, or even a merge. If there is not substantial information for Shakespeare's Egeus to have it's own article, then Egeus should redirect to either A Midsummer Night's Dream or Characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, if we end up with one of those. Take note, Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Aegeus the mythological figure may be related, or based on the same character, but they are not the exact same. It would be like redirecting Puck (Shakespeare) to Puck (mythology) (and by the way, Puck's article could use a good deal of work). Calgary
 * I'm not so sure. Take a look at how other character articles deal with characters that span several stories, such as Green Knight and Troilus. It's not as messy as you might think.  It's actually the way scholars discuss characters, constantly comparing them to previous and later stories, commenting on the changes made and why the author may have changed them.  Besides that, I'm confident that Egeus can stand on his own.  I just stumbled across a solid essay on him, and scholars generally consider him more important than Philostrate, who has a pretty fleshed out article.  I'd like to pick a fight with whoever the goon was who made all of these lame character articles, though.  There is so much out there to add to them, and now I have to clean up his or her mess. Grrr! In any case, I can guarantee you that none of these articles is going to be deleted.  There's just too much information on Shakespeare and I'm just too determined to flesh them out and prove it to you. Wrad 03:35, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Just a request, could you strike out Philostrate on the list above? It doesn't really match any of the reasons for deletion given in the AfD anymore... Wrad 04:14, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'm kind of inclined to agree...I'd withdraw the nomination for Philostrate, but as embarassing as it is, I don't quite know how to withdraw a nomination for a single article that's been nominated as part of a group. I beg your pardon. Also, I've been thinking, and while the individual characters themselves may not be terribly notable on their own, perhaps we could stand to have articles for the Mechanicals as a collective and the Lovers as a collective? I say this because these are two groups in which the characters are very closely associated, with a good deal of information likely to be shared, as well as the fact that from a literary standpoint the collective groups may be of just as much interest and of just as much notability as the individual characters (if not more so). Your thoughts? Calgary 05:14, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Here's how I would withdraw the nomination: Remove his name from the list, create his own personal entry on the AfD, and then just say it has been withdrawn. When it come to talking about the groups as well as the individuals, I had also thought that might be an option. We'll just have to see what there is out there. I have run in to quite a bit about the Rude Mechanicals as a group, but not much about the lovers. Wrad 13:53, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep all but with a stay of execution. Do not underestimate Shakespearean scholars , I take Wrad at his word that he has found several book length sources on most of these characters (and I find that easy to believe).  As for the suggestion of redirects...well, it looks like Puck (Shakespeare) might become a redirect if it isn't worked on soon, and I think this is a good pattern to follow.  If a well sourced article on a Shakespearean character is not possible, the spelling of that character in Shakespeare should redirect to the main mythological or historical reference.  Calgary, you say (understandably, and 'technically' correctly) that Aegeus and Egeus are not the same.  This is actually not true.  Spelling conventions had not been systematized by Shakespeare's time (not for English or for Anglicized Latin and Greek names) .  When he names his character 'Egeus', he probably (with the most certainty we have) means Aegeus (they'd even be pronounced the same, in fact).  So a redirect or a disambig wouldn't be a bad idea.  Oh, and your suggestion for an article for the Mechanicals and one for the Lovers is a really good idea in my opinion.  However, you've got to leave room for a character like Nick Bottom, who has been written about to no end, to also have  an article (IMO, that is).  CaveatLectorTalk 05:24, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Spelling aside, what I was essentially trying to say is thatthere's a substantial difference between the Egeus of Shakespeare and Aegeus of classical mythology. Still, I feel the same (perhaps more strongly)about Theseus, however it seems that he and Hippolyta don't get their own articles as Shakespearean characters. I suppose so long as the Aegeus article makes at least some mention of A Midsummer Night's Dream a redirect wouldn't be too bad...Still, come to think of it, if Egeus is really Theseus's father, that would make the whole thing kind of creepy, no? Calgary 05:44, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep (all). there is no character in shakespeare so minor that he hasn't been discussed in the scholarly commentaries. There should never be a need for a redirect. Its like characters in the Bible, as has been repeatedly been affirmed here. There is a difference between minor characters in Potter and in shakespeare--400 years worth of secondary sources, to be exact., DGG (talk) 06:24, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Bottom definitely desrerves a Keep on notability grounds; therefore I oppose the grouping of the other articles: they should be nomninated and discussed separately. -- SockpuppetSamuelson 07:52, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. As highly notable as the author is, and considering the works are finite and the author is unlikely to produce many more characters, I'm inclined to believe the lesser characters inherit notability in this case. the_undertow talk  08:17, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. Without commenting on some of the others, Nick Bottom is unquestionably sufficiently notable for an article of his own. AndyJones 13:00, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep and do not nominate any of the articles a second time. They are plainly valid encyclopedic topics. RandomCritic 14:17, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep I may be a bit biased, having written a majority of the Bottom article, but in defense of that article specifically, Nick Bottom is considered one of Shakespeare's most iconic character roles. If anything, the article deserves expansion by someone who has the knowledge and resources to expand on the history of the character and it's influence on theatre and on acting, of which I assure you, it has.Benjudah 02:06, 1 August 2007 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.