> What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents

>What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"?

Can you imagine the state of the site after 2 power users have a holy war over whether the recipe is meant to have salt in it or not.

Cooking is not objective so it would be impossible to properly collaborate or decide if an edit made the recipe better or worse.

Cooking is definitely one place that I think the saying "strong opinions, weakly held" is a great motto.

Like I have my way of doing things... and it's the best because I have my own taste profile... but I'll try your way to see if I'm wrong.

Maybe if such comments were heavily moderated (or edited in-place a la the exile) -- cooking is one of the things where even otherwise very reasonable people I've known have gone off the deep end over what seems absurdly trivial to me.

Things like a bagel "toasted" vs "just warmed," dishes that have a variety of regional variations (e.g. a lot of slavic dishes like borsch or stuffed cabbage rolls where I've gotten yelled at by people for pronouncing it the Russian way or making it the Slovak way instead of their own nationality's style) seem to bring up far more intensity than I'd have thought possible, but, you know, I learn more about my friends that way and we've remained friends...

in an internet comments section? Tough to maintain that kind of civility, I think. possible, but tough.

Yeah the authenticity thing especially gets a lot of people going online. I check in and catch up on r/cooking once or twice a week and there are some very strongly held opinions. The funny thing is, the one that gains traction in a post can be either side of the issue depending on the time of day that it's posted. Reddit's voting system carries so much momentum.

And if you decide that the edit made it worse after trying it?

Its better to have each post be owned by someone and then have a ranking system to sort the most liked versions.

Yes, I don't think a wiki is really appropriate for most recipes at all for this reason. There are many different ways to do a recipe each at least close enough to equally valid that you'll have those people arguing over nitpicks for weeks while everyone else steers clear.

You could rank them or something, but the reason I like YouTube is that I can generally get a sense of a person and what they like. If they like similar things to me, I'll probably like their versions of recipes. Inauthentic adjustments or weird herb profiles included.

It would be like every recipe site with a comments section. "Good start but I deleted $X, added $Y and $Z, and added more $A" except that each of those comments would be reflected in changes to the recipe.

If that happens, whoever's in charge just puts in a line that says 'people disagree on whether salt is appropriate or not'. Or not. You can always fork the site if you feel that strongly about it!

...and OrangeMike

The only thing that’s missing for me is pictures of each step, and final dish. Why photos? When I’m doing something for the first time I want to see if I fucked up along the way. :-)

A site like this is valuable for what it does not have. Hundreds of variations or a comment section is a nightmare scenario. That’s the absence of information. It’s just data.

The page needs to show the ingredients and steps so I don’t have to scroll while handling raw meat.

I entirely agree, but HN is filled with ASD savants, so what would you expect? It's not precisely correct, and affirmations about known facts are largely a neurotypical thing.

NOTE: I'm ASD, so please don't call it my "NT privilege"!

A joke I like to say is that a true geek will hear about the President caught in a sex scandal and will obsess about the fact that it was because the password was easy to guess.

There are some food writers that are good at getting to the core of a dish idea, listing out the variations. Felicity Cloake's "Perfect" column in The Guardian for example.

For the Wikipedia of food, Nikki Segnit's Lateral Cooking / Flavour Thesaurus are great -- you start out with basic "stew" technique and then a dozen usual and unusual variations.

Git might not be the best way to manage recipes, especially when you're targeting a section of users who might have never heard of what it is. Sure, the idea of 'viewable history' is nice, but the average cook would find trouble with it. A wiki seems much better suited for this.

To add a recipe, you need to a learn markdown and create a PR. Learning markdown might not be hard, but learning to create a pull request, after creating a github account might put them off.

I don't think "people who are good at cooking and bad at technology" is the target audience here. The target audience is tech people tired of ads and nonsense.

I think it's great as well. So tired of scrolling on recipe sites looking for the actual recipe.