[Wikipedia-l] Recipe

[Andre Engels]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 04:44:27 -0800 (PST), Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The ingredients alone do not make a dish, but also the amount of each ingredient, the way they are mixed together, and in which order they are mixed, and how they are cooked.
> And this is what is a "recipe".

I disagree. Each dish has variations, sometimes wide variations. You
cannot say that there are certain amounts of each ingredient, because
the next person will use different amounts, or even different
ingredients.

> Explaining a dish without explaining how the dish is done is just cruely forgetting information.

Stating exactly how the dish is done is overfeeding with too-specific
information. Should Wikipedia be deciding how long people boil their
eggs?

> All along our articles, we give "examples". Except we do not call them examples, we call them "citing a source to support an argument".
> We say "There is a general sentiment against this country. In her speech of the dd/mm/yyy, Secretary X. mentionned that this country would be forgiven, this one would be ignored while that one would be punished". In most articles, this is a citation. Well, in a dish article, this is a recipe.
> We do that all the time. This is citing sources, examples.
> Why is it different for recipes ?

For one thing, they are not stated as examples. For another, they go
well beyond what is necessary to give the example. I don't like your
example either - this kind of thing usually is done when people start
making a case rather than describing it, that is, go beyond NPOV.

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.

> In all cases, any decent cook will know very well there are as many recipes as there are cooks and days. If one does the job well, he will do the small improvement that makes his recipe unique. And all readers of cookbooks know this and satisfy themselves with general directions for a dish and manage to do it as they feel is best.

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.

> Each time I bake a bread, I follow the recipe of a "bread" and it's different. But to start the first one, I needed information on how to do it. And this is also part of human knowledge.

It may be part of human knowledge, is it the kind of knowledge that
should be in Wikipedia? I seriously doubt it. We don't describe in
detail how to build a table or how to hold family counseling. Why is
cooking any different?

> The other point is NPOV. The argument given is that "recipes varies and accepting one would be being pov". YES, I agree. It is ONE recipe amont others.
> Now, NPOV was created to prevent the project being filled up with personal rants. To avoid it to become just another forum of discussion. Not to become a wall against valid information reporting. We should take NPOV seriously, but not more than what it should be. A useful tool, but not a divine word.

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.

Andre Engels