Wikipedia: William Shakespeare/How to upload Shakespeare to Wikipedia--a good cause

This is an old page from back in spring of 2001, when we weren't entirely sure what Wikipedia would be (what, in addition to an encyclopedia). I tend to agree, now, that Wikipedia isn't the best place to upload editions of famous long works like Shakespeare's plays. Nonetheless, a few briefer very important works, such as the U.S. Declaration of Independence, seem nice to have here, though. --LMS

Here is how I uploaded All's Well That Ends Well. (1) I went to [this page] (there might be a better source) to get the text all in one file. (2) I pasted it into an advanced text editor (MS Word). (3)I saved it as text only, closed the file, and then reopened the file (so that every line appeared with a carriage return after it). (4) I pressed ctrl-H, "find and replace" and replaced all carriage returns (^p) with carriage returns-plus-<br> (i.e. ^p<br>). (5) I found the dramatis personae on a different page and included that... (6) I pasted the whole shebang onto Alls Well That Ends Well--Text (since we will reserve Alls Well That Ends Well for commentary, history, etc., about the play). -- By the way, in the case of some of these plays, they are so long that (for good reasons) Wikipedia's software will not accept a page of that length. So those ones you'll have to upload in individual acts. --LMS

Have a look at what Stephen Gilbert is doing/has done with Macbeth. Very nice! --LMS

Emacs users may use this

(defun play-to-wiki ()
  "Format a play for inclusion in wikipedia

Plays can be downloaded from http://tech-two.mit.edu/Shakespeare/"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion 
    (widen) (mark-whole-buffer) (replace-regexp "$" "<br>")
    ))

Having the whole text in an encyclopaedia is very nice; but the quality of the text could be improved a lot just by stating the customary scholarly information. There's no such thing as "Shakespeare's text of Macbeth". Which edition does the text come from? Has it been subjected to editorial amendations and who were the editors? Has it been proofread against the dead-tree version? Without this information it's just another random, completely non-trustworthy copy of "Macbeth" of which there are hundreds all over the Web. -- AV

AV, if you read the introduction to Project Gutenberg's Shakespeare you'll see that they are explicitly unscholarly - they INTEND to be the "paperback secondary school edition" Shakespeare of the internet.

Yes, but this is no Project Gutenberg. It's an encyclopaedia. It should aim for precision. Just as there's no reason to get a quote wrong when one can check and get it right, there's no reason to use a text with unknown source and editing. I'm not arguing for a scholarly edition, with all the textual differences explained inside. I'm merely arguing for identifying the nature of the document that's pasted into Wikipedia. Where it comes from, whether it's been checked, etc. There's no "Macbeth" all by itself. -- AV

I agree, Anatoly. I'm all in favor of leaving mere links to any outside texts, myself. --MichaelTinkler