[WikiEN-l] Re: recipes

[Ray Saintonge]

Peter Jaros wrote:

>> The war is between two competing visions of Wikipedia.  One side, the 
>> "deletionists", believes in deleting material which they consider to 
>> be diminishing the reputation and authoritative quality of 
>> Wikipedia.  The other side, the "inclusionists", believes that the 
>> purposes of Wikipedia are better served by having articles in an ever 
>> expanding sphere of knowledge defined in the broadest terms, even if 
>> it is in subjects that others may find trivial.  I am clearly in the 
>> latter camp.
>
>
> I suppose I am in my own camp, or perhaps a deletionist sympathizer in 
> the inclusionist camp.  To stretch the word "sympathizer" a bit.
>
> I am in favor "an ever expanding sphere of knowledge defined in the 
> broadest terms".  What I am wary of is becoming the Unedited Guide at 
> h2g2.  This is the body of entries not in the Edited Guide, 
> encompassing works-in-progress, community pages, and random junk.  
> Random junk is fine in a system with an Edited distinction, but here 
> everything is in the main product. 

One of the difficulties is that not everyone has the same definition of 
"random junk".  I can understand your apprehensions, but the way that 
things are removed is just as important as what is removed.  If things 
are removed in the "wrong" way many otherwise valuable contributors can 
see this as a disrespect of their efforts.

> I support the hosting of recipes, but I support the encyclopedic "look 
> and feel" first and foremost.  If that means removing some recipes, 
> they ought to be moved to Wikibooks and not blindly deleted, but I 
> think many recipes have a home in the encyclopedic format.  It make 
> take a bit of moving, but it shouldn't require *re*moving.
>
>> If a duplicate of a recipe remains o Wikipedia, no harm is done, and 
>> perhaps when the cookbook in Wikibooks is recognized as a serious 
>> project people won't mind replacing the chocolate cake recipe in 
>> Wikipedia with a statement like, "For a chocolate cake recipe see 
>> [[Wikibooks:Chocolate cake]]", but until then attempts to remove them 
>> will only cause arguments.
>
>
> Sounds good to me.  Then this is one of the next steps. 

Yes that would be making the Wikibooks cookbook a respected project 
where contributors will see that as a site of choice when they want to 
add a recipe.

Ec

>