John Knouse wrote:
I find this whole recipe argument kind of odd. What's wrong with sample recipes? Someone can, for instance, read the article about tapioca and not get a very complete understanding of it. But a recipe that the reader can make can provide a far more complete understanding of tapioca.
I think it's because despite their textual appearance, recipes are a lot more like images than articles. For instance, most people also don't like articles consisting only of an image, and the level of editing allowed for each is severely constrained; people would object to me rearranging image contents with a photo editor as much as if I tripled the salt in a recipe because I like everything salty. In fact, Auntie Bea's recipe very nearly needs to be handled as a source document, in that doing much more than spelling fixes amounts to changing it into something that is no longer her recipe.
Here's a possibility: have a Wikibooks cookbook that all the food articles can link to (that is, pointing to specific recipes).
The Wikibook seems like a good idea in general. Joy of Cooking notwithstanding, not everybody wants to wade through the history of chocolate cake before finding out how many eggs are needed. :-)
Stan