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I don't see how this could ever truly compete with traditional cookbooks. It can easily have the same recipes, and it doesn't need to compete, in the same way

by kick 7y ago

I don't see how this could ever truly compete with traditional cookbooks. It can easily have the same recipes, and it doesn't need to compete, in the same way Wikipedia doesn't with traditional encyclopedias: when you take away commercial incentive, something can just exist. I don't want to eat the exact same macaroni and cheese dish served on one side of the country that I can on the other. Great! Looks like there are a few dozen options, and there are alternative recipes in some of these pages: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=macaroni&prefix=Cookbook%3A&fulltext=Search+Cookbook https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=macaroni... I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be standardized, nor should it. Wikis are descriptive, not prescriptive. This book seems to be so, as well, making no attempt at standardization. If you have thousands of Reuben recipes you want to input, why not? You cannot standardize the world's recipes into a monolithic volume like Wikimedia has done with facts. Wikipedia doesn't standardize anything. You totally can collect them; there are a bunch of cooking sites and applications on the internet, just as there are a bunch of sites that collect facts. I mean you could, but the 7,000 variations on every chef's take on a Reuben sandwich would be a chore to sift through. That's what curation is for, and there are plenty of people who search through Wikipedia, find interesting articles, and share them. Facts rarely change, tastes often do. This makes a wiki the best possible place for recipes, then. Not only is there no hard-limit on the amount of content (storage is very nearly free, especially given Wikimedia's fundraising numbers), there's also version control history, and HTML has subheadings for variations on the same recipe that might occur over time.

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
Cookbooks as written by a single chef are generally suggestions and collections of similar tastes, not static lists of every single recipe under the sun. I regularly seek out cookbooks written by a handful of trusted chefs, and devour the information contained within them with great trust and pleasure. I don't just go to the library and take out all the cookbooks I can carry home. Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner, and then make that quickly for my family. Traditional cookbooks exist because most of us are not chefs and we don't know what goes good with what. If we did, we could easily make use of a cook's flavor bible which is essentially what this monolithic wiki-cookbook will become imho.
- Vinnl 7y ago
  There are two points of relevance here, I think. The first is that yours is one way of consuming recipes, but another is to simply look for news recipe in different cookbooks or, increasingly often, find one at a random food blog. The second is that even collections are very much possible on a wiki, or even outside it, by just compiling links to the wiki articles. For example, I enjoy cookbooks written about a single cuisine (e.g. listing all kinds of Middle Eastern recipes together), because they will then often go well together. One could easily imagine a Wikibooks page compiling related recipes into a recommendation list.
- grawprog 7y ago
  I dunno, a page that lists a bunch of variations on a recipe, curated with some kind of objective ratings system sounds pretty awesome to me. >Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner The thing is, after enough experience cooking, you don't need to do this. If you know what the ingredients taste like and you know generally the ratios of each ingredient, you can make a rough estimate of the expected flavour of the final dish in your head. A curated system would help you learn this as you'll start to notice certain ingredients regularly being used in certain situations. I personally use recipes as a starting point, for most things, some recipes do need to be exact, especially baking recipes, or a general guide. Once i've got a good idea of the main ingredients for a dish I figure out what flavours would add to it. Cooking doesn't need to be exact, hence why one dish can have 100 different recipes. The secret to cooking is learning the characteristics of different ingredients and how to apply them to your food. Everything in a recipe has a purpose, once you figure out the purpose of different ingredients you can use them sort of without really thinking about them. You start thinking more about the situation of the current dish and what ingredients would go well, rather than what exact recipe you should follow.

by kick 7y ago

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

Cookbooks as written by a single chef are generally suggestions and collections of similar tastes, not static lists of every single recipe under the sun. I regularly seek out cookbooks written by a handful of trusted chefs, and devour the information contained within them with great trust and pleasure. I don't just go to the library and take out all the cookbooks I can carry home. Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner, and then make that quickly for my family. Traditional cookbooks exist because most of us are not chefs and we don't know what goes good with what. If we did, we could easily make use of a cook's flavor bible which is essentially what this monolithic wiki-cookbook will become imho.

Vinnl 7y ago
There are two points of relevance here, I think. The first is that yours is one way of consuming recipes, but another is to simply look for news recipe in different cookbooks or, increasingly often, find one at a random food blog. The second is that even collections are very much possible on a wiki, or even outside it, by just compiling links to the wiki articles. For example, I enjoy cookbooks written about a single cuisine (e.g. listing all kinds of Middle Eastern recipes together), because they will then often go well together. One could easily imagine a Wikibooks page compiling related recipes into a recommendation list.
grawprog 7y ago
I dunno, a page that lists a bunch of variations on a recipe, curated with some kind of objective ratings system sounds pretty awesome to me. >Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner The thing is, after enough experience cooking, you don't need to do this. If you know what the ingredients taste like and you know generally the ratios of each ingredient, you can make a rough estimate of the expected flavour of the final dish in your head. A curated system would help you learn this as you'll start to notice certain ingredients regularly being used in certain situations. I personally use recipes as a starting point, for most things, some recipes do need to be exact, especially baking recipes, or a general guide. Once i've got a good idea of the main ingredients for a dish I figure out what flavours would add to it. Cooking doesn't need to be exact, hence why one dish can have 100 different recipes. The secret to cooking is learning the characteristics of different ingredients and how to apply them to your food. Everything in a recipe has a purpose, once you figure out the purpose of different ingredients you can use them sort of without really thinking about them. You start thinking more about the situation of the current dish and what ingredients would go well, rather than what exact recipe you should follow.