I have always been of the opinion that recipies/howtos/instructions are perfectly fine for wikipedia. Wiki is not paper, after all, and knowledge about how to do things is knowledge.
I don't buy the argument that recipes are inherently POV. First of all, it's a bit odd to think of a recipe as potentially biased, isn't it? I suppose it's possible for one to be biased about a recipe "This is the only proper way to boil an egg". But it's also entirely possible to be NPOV, by giving alternate methods in the same article or in different articles.
Britannica has 66,000 articles, I believe. It seems likely that in en: alone, we will have 10x that many within a few more years. Even if we stick to "traditional conventions" about what belongs in an encyclopedia, our superior production methods mean that we can have 10x their coverage. But if we understand that wiki is not paper, I can imagine us having 100x their coverage.
I'm not a dogmatist on this point (recipes), I'm just throwing out for consideration -- what exactly makes this non-encyclopedic, other than the constraints of paper on traditional encyclopedias?
--Jimbo
Jimmy-
I don't buy the argument that recipes are inherently POV. First of all, it's a bit odd to think of a recipe as potentially biased, isn't it? I suppose it's possible for one to be biased about a recipe "This is the only proper way to boil an egg". But it's also entirely possible to be NPOV, by giving alternate methods in the same article or in different articles.
Well, Jimbo, there are more complicated recipes than boiling eggs ;-). And the more complicated it is, the more annoying it will be when you're trying to follow it and have to deal with separating the points of view. Worst of all, these POVs will become inconsistent with one another, so you have to follow who is saying what in order to produce something edible. The egg faction argues .. the milk advocates claim .. but the water admirers feel ..
I agree with the notion that recipes should be either on Wikibooks, or on a separate project. What's wrong with that? It's not like content moved to Wikibooks is somehow lost to the project. We can still link to it.
If someone wants to write an NPOV article *about* a certain recipe, its history, the different variants etc., than that may have a place in Wikipedia. But the two are fundamentally different.
I believe Wikibooks also needs more mothers.
Regards,
Erik
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I'm not a dogmatist on this point (recipes), I'm just throwing out for consideration -- what exactly makes this non-encyclopedic, other than the constraints of paper on traditional encyclopedias?
Well, except in the case of a very few dishes which have an "official" way of doing them, there is generally no one recipe for any given dish. Guacamole, for example, has as many recipes as there are people who make guacamole: the recipe is essentially "put anything you want into mashed avocado". Sure, cookbooks often give a particular recipe for many popular dishes, but I don't see us as a cookbook. We can instead describe what a dish is, and if someone wants a particular cook's opinion on exactly how many tablespoons of this and that to include, they can buy a cookbook from that cook.
Again, I'd refer people to [[turkey (food)]], which I hope does a good job with the balance. It even mentions 30-45 minutes as common cooking time for deep-fried turkey, without giving instructions such as "fry for 38 minutes at 450 F", which would not really be supportable.
Plus I just don't like the tone. I'd rather we be descriptive. [[Virus cleaning]] that describes what virus cleaning is and how it's usually done, instead of [[How to clean your computer of viruses]] that gives instructions.
-Mark
On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 16:14, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I'm not a dogmatist on this point (recipes), I'm just throwing out for consideration -- what exactly makes this non-encyclopedic, other than the constraints of paper on traditional encyclopedias?
--Jimbo
Even historically, bugger all!
(pardon my french) The original french encyclopaedists made a point of detailing as many crafts and industries as possible, down to the most minute detail, with graphic illustrations capable of practical implementation. This is what made them notable in their own time as spreading the industrial revolution.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (aka Cimon Avaro)