Template:Folger Shakespeare/doc

This template is for creating short inline citations to William Shakespeare's plays in the digital editions made available by the Folger Shakespeare Library. It's patterned on sfn and meant to be used as an inline citation in the text of articles that need to reference the plays' text as a primary source.

Usage
All arguments are required.

The first positional (unnamed) argument is one of the known names for the play configured in Module:Folger Shakespeare/plays. For most plays this is just the same as the Wikipedia article, but for some plays there are convenience aliases like  for.

The second and third arguments are the numerical act and scene, both given as arabic (not roman) numerals.

The last argument is either a single line number, or a line number range with the start and end of the range delimited with either a normal hyphen or an en-dash. Em-dashes are not supported and the dash is always unspaced.

Examples

 * &rarr;
 * &rarr; "To be or not to be"

Supported plays
This is the list of plays the template currently knows about, and the keys you can use to refer to each one. The list is generated from the module's configuration and will update automatically. If you've changed the configuration and this list is not up to date either wait a little or use a null edit or page purge to force it to update.

Use in references section
When you use short citations inline with sfn you need a full citation in the "References" section. This template generates citations that are self-contained (they generate external links, not links to a full citation) but this would be inconsistent with other short citations used in many articles. It is therefore good practice to include an explanatory text at the start of the "References" sections like this:

All references to the text of Romeo and Juliet are to the Folger Shakespeare Library's digital edition edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles.

Alternately, you can create a long reference like…



…using the code:

Update title and url as needed.

Limitations
The Folger Shakespeare digital texts are not, despite early assurances, very stable. The Folger doesn't provide persistent identifiers for the lay texts, and act/scene/line targets do not come with API-like guarantees. That means every time they redesign their website this template needs to be updated. Thankfully the concept of looking up play, act, scene, and line is pretty fundamental and universal so it's unlikely they'll change the website in such a way that this template can't be updated to support it.

The template currently does not support linking to stage directions, speech prefixes, prologues, and similar. At least some of these may be possible to support in the future.

The template also currently doesn't support so-called Folger Through-Line Numbers (ftln). This is planned for the future, but hasn't been added yet.

It also does not support the narrative poems and the sonnets since these do not have acts or scenes. The texts are available from the Folger so support for this is planned for the future. The template Folger inline is not subject to some of these limitations.