[WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 10, Issue 58

Fri May 21 18:08:52 UTC 2004

John Knouse wrote:

>I find this whole recipe argument kind of odd.  What's wrong
>with sample recipes?  Someone can, for instance, read the
>article about tapioca and not get a very complete
>understanding of it.  But a recipe that the reader can make
>can provide a far more complete understanding of tapioca.
>
>
I think it's because despite their textual appearance, recipes are
a lot more like images than articles. For instance, most people also
don't like articles consisting only of an image, and the level of
editing allowed for each is severely constrained; people would
object to me rearranging image contents with a photo editor as much
as if I tripled the salt in a recipe because I like everything salty.
In fact, Auntie Bea's recipe very nearly needs to be handled as a
source document, in that doing much more than spelling fixes amounts
to changing it into something that is no longer her recipe.

>Here's a possibility:  have a Wikibooks cookbook that all
>the food articles can link to (that is, pointing to specific
>recipes).
>
The Wikibook seems like a good idea in general. Joy of Cooking
notwithstanding, not everybody wants to wade through the history
of chocolate cake before finding out how many eggs are needed. :-)

Stan