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ONE of many insights into the business of early modern theatre in England provided by a document such as Philip Henslowe's Diary is the sheer number of plays London-based companies had in production, season to season. For good reasons, plays surviving in print and manuscript have attracted the most scholarly attention. Yet many more plays - now lost except by title or oblique reference in documents of the period - were also significant factors in the theatrical marketplace. Being mutually interested in the professional playing companies and their commerce, we began a conversation in 2008 about a medium for gathering and disseminating information on the lost plays of the early modern period. We agreed that such information was valuable to the scholarly community because a knowledge of lost plays expands the fields both of repertory and cultural studies. But how should such data be published? Typically, the information on lost plays is uneven in quality and reliability. Further, the plays themselves are not necessarily related to one another by date or provenance. A traditional print medium for scholarly argument such as an article or monograph did not seem suitable for the presentation of such raw and fragmentary material. We therefore came to the conclusion that an electronic database in a wiki format, a Lost Plays Database (LPD), was a viable option.
The appeal of a wiki was immediate. It is a medium designed to present data piecemeal or whole. It thrives on attracting scholars with a similar enthusiasm for lost plays. Also, the wiki format, as with other Web 2.0 applications, is geared for interactive exchange: it allows end-users to create and alter site content directly, without Web developers. Given Internet connectivity, we could work on entries as readily in Little Rock, Arkansas, as Melbourne, Australia; on the sun-washed deck of a vacation time-share as in the reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library. We decided early in the conceptual process that a database best enabled a body of data to speak for itself, with minimal interpretation or analysis. Our wiki version accommodates documentary information as well as the opinions of its contributors through their selection and characterization of relevant subject matter (see the discussion of the template, below). Early in our conversation, we decided...