Peter Jaros wrote:
On Feb 25, 2004, at 7:13 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
I do get a little hot over these deletion issues. :-)
I understand. I'm very much against deletion of recipes (and most valid information), I just think we need to define the right place for them.
The expression that I found most patronizing was "it might merit its own section". I suspect that the subtleties between descriptive and prescriptive or between imperatiuve and indicative might not be meningful to the casual reader who wants to find out about a food and/or how to make it. The technical detailsof chocolate cakes are not inherently controversial. If different ways exist for making such a cake, the results of which is better can be entirely subjective.
My point was not about controversy or POV, just about appropriateness. A drink recipe generally describes the drink, while a chocolate cake recipe does not describe chocolate cake. If a particular cake recipe is famous and generally significant, I would say it warrants its own section or article (regarding its significance, history, etc.). There the recipe *would* describe the topic (being the topic itself).
I get the impression now that you blindly walked into an old war, only to realise that bullets were flying in every direction. The Battle of Recipes was only one episode. :-)
The war is between two competing visions of Wikipedia. One side, the "deletionists", believes in deleting material which they consider to be diminishing the reputation and authoritative quality of Wikipedia. The other side, the "inclusionists", believes that the purposes of Wikipedia are better served by having articles in an ever expanding sphere of knowledge defined in the broadest terms, even if it is in subjects that others may find trivial. I am clearly in the latter camp.
I don't work much at Wikibooks, so I am in no position to comment on its policies. Producing a cookbook seems well within its mandate. It would also seem to me that it would approach a subject in a broader, more systematic way. In the course of doing that it should be free to copy any recipe from Wikipedia that it sees fit. I even think that Wikibooks might be a good place for starting the "1.0" project for a stable printed version of Wikipedia that proponents prefer to only talk about.
If a duplicate os a recipe remains o Wikipedia, no harm is done, and perhaps when the cookbook in Wikibooks is recognized as a serious project people won't mind replacing the chocolate cake recipe in Wikipedia with a statement like, "For a chocolate cake recipe see [[Wikibooks:Chocolate cake]]", but until then attempts to remove them will only cause arguments.
Ec