[WikiEN-l] Re: HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other imperativecontent

[Jimmy Wales]

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