[WikiEN-l] Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re recipes andhow-tos?

Tue May 11 11:17:01 UTC 2004

No, a few people discussed it on the how to talk page. Most people have never shown much of an interest in how to type article, so we just decided amongst ourselves really. It was decided that the recipes should be moved first, we'd worry about the other stuff later. Then people started complaining that stuff was being deleted, so then every recipe started going through VfD. In the meantime people still put How tos on VfD claiming they are unencylopedic. 

As a contributor of lot's of How to pages my own opinion is that I don't care if it's wikipedia or wikibooks, I just want them somewhere, and I don't want people adding VfD notes on them.

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel P.B.Smith [mailto:dpbsmith at verizon.net] 
Sent: 11 May 2004 11:53
To: daniwo59 at aol.com
Cc: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re recipes andhow-tos?

NOT a rhetorical question. 

I've been very puzzled by an apparent consensus or policy--one with which I obviously do not agree--that recipes in particular, and didactic or "how-to" articles in general, do not belong in Wikipedia. I can give cogent-to-me reasons for not agreeing with this. But I don't want to discuss that now. 

Here's what I want to know. Is this an example of a difficult, carefully-threshed-out consensus that newer Wikipedians, having not participated in that consensus, may be unaware of? 

(And if so why isn't it documented on any of the policy pages I've been able to find?) 
-- 
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net alternate: dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu 
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! 
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html 
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