Imran Ghory wrote:
On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, David Friedland wrote:
Under what Wikipedia articles are not:
* Instructions. Wikipedia seeks to be informative, not instructional.
In the words of [[James Murray]] "we should be descrptive, not
prescriptive".
I agree with that proposal. For my opinion of one possible way to do it
properly, look at the edit history of [[en:turkey (food)]]. It used to
be a "how to cook a turkey" set of recipes, which were moved to
wikibooks, but I refactored the content into an encyclopedia article
about turkey as a food, that actually kept somewhere around 80% of the
material from the recipe article. Things like "Turkey is often eaten
with cranberry jelly, especially around the holidays in the US and UK"
are encyclopedic, in my opinion, while a straight recipe with
instructions on how many tablespoons of this and that to use, and how
many minutes and at what degrees to bake it at, are not.
To take another example, we really need a [[guacamole]] article, but
there are a zillion ways to make guacamole, so I don't think it's useful
on Wikipedia to give a recipe.
Bad: "to make guacamole, here is one recipe: one tomato; half a lime;
one clove garlic; three avocados. Peel avocados, and mash into a paste;
finely dice the garlic and mix in, and dice the tomato and mix in. Add
lime juice and optionally other flavorings, and let sit in the
refrigerator for 30 minutes before serving."
Good: "Guacamole is a popular avocado-based dip, forming a major part of
[[Tex-Mex]] cuisine. It is often eaten with chips, much like [[salsa]],
but is also often commonly used to season a variety of other Tex-Mex
foods, such as [[taco]]s. The particular ingredients used to make
guacamole vary (besides the avocados, which are always present), but
often include tomato, garlic, and onion. In addition, most people add a
small amount of lime juice, both to give the dip some tartness, and
because the acid prevents oxidation of the avocado, which would give the
dip an unappetizing brown color."
(Just a first stab at it, of course.)
So, in general, I'd say "no" to "recipe for guacamole" or
"how to remove
viruses from your computer" and so on, but "yes" to similar information
presented as an encyclopedia article. Sometimes that requires moving
some excessively detailed and special-purpose information to Wikibooks,
but usually it just requires just rephrasing the same information as
descriptive instead of prescriptive, as in the James Murray quote.
-Mark