Talk:Tom Sawyer

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For the record, I never raced bugs in class, tried to impress girls by fighting, or got lost in caves. Maybe the "every boy can relate to" part is POV? --Dante Alighieri 22:02 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)

Well, yeah, the 19th century POV I suppose. Anyway in the long interval since you posted it appears that bit has been removed. However not much has been done to the article, alas. Ellsworth 00:47, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Article needed

You know, this really shouldn't be a disambiguation page, but an article about the character Tom Sawyer. He's an American icon, not to mention the main character of a substantial number of works of art in different media. He deserves his own article. Nareek 01:46, 23 June 2006 (UTC)


I agree. This is a seminal American novel that has been adapted in multiple media. This needs a full article, merging the two existing articles would be a good start.

The article states that Tom Sawyer was born in 1833, this makes no sense at all. If that is true then he must have been about 40 years old in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. CrazyAwesome 01:29, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

No, that date is correct. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was written in 1876, but it was set in the 1840s. --JayHenry 01:56, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Can we please not merge

I've said at talk:The Adventures of Tom Sawyer what an incredibly poor idea a merge would be. Tom Sawyer, the character, appears in four Mark Twain novels. Merging him with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an awful idea because his most important appearance is, in fact, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If you merged the character page into The Adventures of Tom Sawyer you would have to have a section, in the article on one book, about the other books that Tom Sawyer appeared in. I can't state emphatically enough what a poor idea this is. This would be like merging Porky Pig into the article on Porky's Hare Hunt. --JayHenry 15:41, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

How about we all make one a q&a page

[edit] Creation of a new character page

For what it's worth, here's my thoughts...

What seems to have happened here is that a page about the 'character' of Tom Sawyer has ended up as a disambiguation page with very little character information on it.

I think a new page should be created for the actual character - something like Tom Sawyer (character) (with a link to the dab. page at the top), and this particular page changed to be a pure disambiguation page with a link to the new character page.

I've suggested doing it this way, rather than changing this page to be the character description page and adding a new dab. page, as I think that when most people enter in 'Tom Sawyer' as the search criteria, they're not normally looking for details on the character - he's become so much part of literary heritage (even over here in England ! :-) that most people would know some details about him and would, in fact, be using WP to try and find that book or film they vaguely recall in which the character appeared. Leaving Tom Sawyer as the dab. page would therefore seem to be the most useful (though I don't know if this violates any WP policies...?)

One remaining issue would be to tidy up the dozens of links on other pages which read something like '...xxx is a Tom Sawyer type character...' and change the link to be the character page instead of here - but that's more time consuming than difficult.

CultureDrone 08:01, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Or.....

Or, having looked at the WP guidelines for dab. pages, this page could be tidied up back into a character description page with a nice prominment link to a new dab. page at the top, and move the majority of stuff off here to the new dab. page......

CultureDrone 08:11, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

Please make comments at Talk:List of characters in the Tom Sawyer series. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast 00:20, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tom Sawyer page

I'm going to work on making this a full article, in the meantime, please do NOT add anything about the song, etc to this page. =) -CamT|C 04:14, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

I copied the text from List of characters in the Tom Sawyer series#Thomas Sawyer to prevent Tom Sawyer from being blank: some fly-by-night tagger might cause you problems by speedy deleting it. Good luck on this project. I hope you make it all the way to FA. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 04:57, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Twain v. Clemens

I tend to think that all these articles should generally use "Twain" rather than "Clemens." He is commonly known as Twain; it says Mark Twain on the cover of all his books; main article has always been at Twain; also as guidance, compare Twain to Clemens. WP:COMMONNAME actually specifically includes Twain as an example of a pseudonym that should be used. I don't want to just revert, but I'm leaning pretty strongly that it should be Twain and is actually a bit confusing as Clemens. --JayHenry (talk) 06:29, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Alright, I will make sure to keep that in mind, although Twain would probably come more naturally to me anyway. -CamT|C 08:55, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Move & Redirect

I would like to propose that this page be moved to Tom Sawyer (character) and that this be a redirect to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer because when someone searches up "Tom Sawyer", they generally want the story. Until it was been decided, could someone put something at the top saying"For the novel by Mark Twain, go to The adventures of Tom Sawyer"? Thank you, Gramy (talk) 19:47, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

One problem is that Tom Sawyer the character, and 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' are (in my opinion) often taken as synonymous - I'm not sure that it can be definately stated that someone entering 'Tom Sawyer' as a search term (whether in Wikipedia, Google, or any other search engine) is more or less likely to be looking for the character or the book. This particular page has alternated over time between the two and, at one point in the past, this resulted in this page ending up as a very badly formed semi-disambiguation page - partly about the character, partly about the book, and not satisfactorily covering either - something I tried to help clean up, and something I'm keen to avoid reoccurring. I don't know what WP policy is where there the tem is ambiguous but there is no obvious 'main' use of the term... perhaps someone can enlighten me ? CultureDrone (talk) 22:28, 29 March 2008 (UTC)