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(a)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(a)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(a)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
___________________
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org