There seems to be a difference in opinion about what a recipe is. Those who are against having recipes as part of the food articles appear to think that including a recipe is a(n attempt of) falsification of different points of view.
A well-written recipe is, in my opinion, a very valuable part of a food article. When that is said, it is of course essential from a lexicographic point of view that:
1) It is clear that the recipe is a description rather than proscription. 2) The provided recipe/s is/are reasonably representative for the tradition in question. 3) Common variations are listed in the recipe/s. 4) It is made clear what the general source for the provided recipe is.
Also, some recipes are very loosely defined, whilst others are by nature extremely fine-tuned. The provided examples (recipes) will, if properly written, help make this clear.
From: Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com Of course we want to know what they are. And of course you can write about it. But what I do not want is to be specified how much saffron I need, just that it's there, and why.
Sometimes this is essential information, and other times it is not.
Wikipedia should describe what the world is, what things are. Not be prescriptive in what one should be doing. The article on food products should specify what's in them and how they are made, but a recipe is not a good way to do so. Just like the table article does not specify which length the legs of a table should be,
I beg to differ: It is essential information to mention the difference in leg length of a diningroom table as opposed to a sofa table.
the arancini article should not specify what filling should be in or how long it should be fried.
Maybe not. But that depends on what arancini-like foods one needs to distinguish arancini from in a contrastive perspective. It also depends on what the actual cultural criteria are for how much variation there can be in the preparation before the result is no longer considered to be arancini. (Which is not to say that the resulting non-arancini need to be inferior in any way. They just happen to be something-else-than-arancini.)
From: Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com In 3 years now, I have NEVER seen an edit war on a recipe. I have seen people adding that "though beef was usually used for the recipe, pork was also used as well". And I never saw anyone complain with this.
Sounds about right... :)
From: Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com Stating exactly how the dish is done is overfeeding with too-specific information. Should Wikipedia be deciding how long people boil their eggs?
Maybe. If describing boiled eggs, it may be essential to describe the process well enough that a person who doesn't already know how many minutes it is boiled *in a specific tradition* is able to find this information. It is also essential that any such cultural description be relativised through explicitly providing the information about *who* cook/s the eggs for the specified number of minutes. If people from one culture tend to boil eggs for two minutes and slurp them up from the shell with a bit of salt, there is nothing wrong in Wikipedia articles mentioning this as long as the description is properly qualified. It should then, of course, also be mentioned that other cultures slow-cook their eggs for close to 20 hours, peel the eggs before serving, and serve these eggs one-per-person as a brown-grean-and-yellow almost creamy hors d'oeuvre.
But even without looking at that, the way they are presented, they are not examples. They are descriptions, and often rather forcibly so ("you should do this-and-that"). My objections would be much less _if they were indeed given as examples_. On the Dutch Wikipedia I have recently proposed to consider recepies "a kind of image", and add them in a separate block as such, not part of the main description.
Not at all a bad idea! :-)
Which to me is exactly the reason why we should not have them in Wikipedia. If recepies were just "general directions", I would not be so much against them. But they are not. They give one, specific recepy, and take that as the be all and end all.
Not if they are well integrated and properly qualified. Just like a picture, a data table, or a graph representing specific data of relevance.
But what defines "valid information". Is it "valid information" that an egg should boil a certain amount of time? Unless we give ourselves an amount of authority I'd say we should not even strive for, my answer is no.
That it "should" boil a certain amount of time? Probably not. That it *is typically* boiled a certain amount of time in a particular and explicitly specified cultural setting? Yes, in my opinion.
-Olve
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Olve Utne http://utne.nvg.org
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 18:37:35 -0500, Olve Utne utne@nvg.org wrote:
A well-written recipe is, in my opinion, a very valuable part of a food article. When that is said, it is of course essential from a lexicographic point of view that:
- It is clear that the recipe is a description rather than proscription.
- The provided recipe/s is/are reasonably representative for the tradition
in question. 3) Common variations are listed in the recipe/s. 4) It is made clear what the general source for the provided recipe is.
Also, some recipes are very loosely defined, whilst others are by nature extremely fine-tuned. The provided examples (recipes) will, if properly written, help make this clear.
And this is where I see the problem. It is my opinion that *almost all* recepies should be loosely defined on Wikipedia. And a real recepy is *almost always* extremely fine-tuned.
Wikipedia should describe what the world is, what things are. Not be prescriptive in what one should be doing. The article on food products should specify what's in them and how they are made, but a recipe is not a good way to do so. Just like the table article does not specify which length the legs of a table should be,
I beg to differ: It is essential information to mention the difference in leg length of a diningroom table as opposed to a sofa table.
I'd say we mention the table heights rather than the leg lengths, but the more important part is how we tell that. "A kitchen table has a height such that it reaches approximately an adult's middle (ca. 80 cm)" (don't quote me on the exact number). Not: "If you want to make a kitchen table, start by getting four pieces of wood of 69x4x4 cm each."
the arancini article should not specify what filling should be in or how long it should be fried.
Maybe not. But that depends on what arancini-like foods one needs to distinguish arancini from in a contrastive perspective. It also depends on what the actual cultural criteria are for how much variation there can be in the preparation before the result is no longer considered to be arancini. (Which is not to say that the resulting non-arancini need to be inferior in any way. They just happen to be something-else-than-arancini.)
I agree totally. But the piece I reacted to had said itself already that there is a wide range in fillings. Which means we should specify the range rather than choose 1 or 2 or 10 from it and give those in details.
Andre Engels
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