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