Policy

This page describes policies for pages in this wiki.

Recipe Formatting

Case

The de-facto naming convention for a page is Title Case.

Name and Description

Recipes should be named according to their name as per the references. If the recipe name is the same across cuisines, but the recipe itself is not, then indicate the cuisine name in brackets like Lasagna (Italian) or Lasagna (Greek).

Recipes with a non-English name that have a common English name should be named with their common English name. For example, the primary name for Khaeng Keaw Wan should be Thai Green Curry. If necessary or desired a redirect from the name in the original language can be created. In cases where the non-English name is the common name, that name should be used, as in Huevos Rancheros.

Recipes names with special characters (diacritics, etc) should be primarily spelled with simple ASCII characters and a redirect should be created with the special characters included.

Describe the food right at the top of the recipe to help someone imagine what the result is supposed to be like. Individuals can discuss their cooking attempts on the recipe's talk page. If the Calories are known, please note them. Total preparation time and number of servings is also expected to be noted.

References

Each recipe requires a title, followed by at least two notable references and then a sentence or two describing the recipe. Recipe pages should not contain the history of a recipe or any other editorials. After the description, the list of ingredients must be shown followed by the instructions. Links to ingredients should be links to the page to a local page that transcluses the content from Wikipedia. Glossaries are also not allowed. Next should be links to the recipes of notable variations with a quick summary of each variation. This is then followed by the references, a link to the relevant local pages that transclued Wikipedia content and then External Links.

Generally speaking, for a given food, there should be only one recipe per locale per cuisine and the recipe need to be self-contained. Exceptions include variations where an ingredient is optional or substituted but the instructions and other portions remain exactly the same as the original Recipes.

Recipes should be formatted according to the recipe template.

Special Diets

Recipes for a special diet which are substantially adjusted variations of a normal recipe should be denoted by the diet name in parentheses after the name of the recipe. A vegan variation of Chili would be Chili (Vegan); a gluten-free variation of Brownie would be Brownies (Gluten-Free); a lactose-free variation of Milkshake would be Milkshake (Lactose-Free). Recipes which adhere to a special diet, but are not variations for that specific diet should not be named in this fashion; instead only the appropriate category should be added. Trivial variations should be listed on the recipe page itself. Recipes must only be for humans.

Cuisine Pages

Cuisine Page should have a brief one or two sentence description followed by a link to the Wikipedia description of the cuisine. It is essentially a portal to recipes with a category of that cuisine.

Pages needing work

Pages which need work should be tagged with the {{cookwork}} template, and will appear in Category:Cookbook pages needing work. When a recipe has been sufficiently improved, the template should be removed.

Duplicate Recipes and Disambiguation Pages

When there is more than one recipe for a single type of food, there are several ways to resolve the situation:

1. If one recipe is of poor quality or has no references, delete it.
2. If one recipe can be expressed as a variation upon the other, include it in the variations section.
3. If the recipes can be merged into a single recipe, merge them and delete the originals.
4. Create a disambiguation page for the 'abstract' type of food (using the template as a header) and give each recipe a unique name.

Categories

Categories are required to adhere to the following standard.

1. "Normal Capitalization" wikipedia form of capitalized first letter, lowercased first letter elsewhere (except with proper nouns).

2. The cuisine(s) that the recipe is applicable to should be noted and backed up with references that indicate that the recipe is, in fact, part of the noted cuisine.

3. If the recipe is for something that is generally internationally recognized, such as Margherita pizza, the cuisine of origin should the only cuisine related category associated to the recipe.

For recipe categorization by ingredient, origin, diet, meal type, and recipe type classifications use the "___ recipes" format e.g.:

• Category:Egg Recipes (by ingredient)
• Category:Italian cuisine (by cuisine)
• Category:Vegan Recipes (by diet)
• Category:Cake Recipes (by recipe type)
• Category:Dessert Recipes (by meal type)

Avoid combining concepts into a single category, such as "Avocado Salad Recipes" instead, associate two categories such as "Avocado Recipes" and "Salad Recipes".

Stop spammers and vandals

Notice the "Recent changes" link in the left sidebar. You can use this to see the most recent modifications. There is a drop down menu near the top of the list that lets you select a specific namespace.

Now you can see all the recent cookbook edits. You can revert an edit by going to the page history, choosing the most recent good version, editing that version (note the warning you'll see), and saving the result. If you are fairly sure that the bad edit was intentionally bad, get an administrator to block the user.

Nominate and judge potential editors

Requests for permissions require votes. Without votes, progress will tend to be slow. Without editors, the vandals and spammers run wild. If you see a user who appears fit to be an editor, you should nominate them on that page. While there, vote for all the candidates that seem decent to you.

Add pictures for ingredients and tools

See Wikimedia Commons for where the pictures are or should be. Start at Category:Food as a first place to look, but some images may not be properly categorized.

Many US government sites are excellent sources of public domain (no copyright) pictures. You can use Google image search with the site:gov option to find these. To be more specific, site:usda.gov or site:fda.gov can be used. Use site:mil for military sites (as the military does serve food). In general, do not use these photos for recipes. After you find an appropriate image, upload it either here or at Commons, and add it to the pages.

Add pictures for recipes

For recipes, you really should cook the food. For example, this cookbook has two lemon meringue pie recipes. The pies look and taste different from each other, although they are similar. It would be bad to use a generic picture from an unknown recipe. As above, images can be stored at the Wikimedia Commons to make images available for all Wikimedia Foundation projects, or uploaded to Wikibooks for cookbook-only use.

When taking pictures, try to use something other than a yellowish 60W light bulb and Xenon flash. Natural sunlight, GE Reveal bulbs, and most plant (greenhouse) lights will work well, especially if you can hold the camera steady and suppress the flash. Try to show both the inside and outside of foods where this would be applicable. Cropping the image would be a good idea; use the jpegtran program with the lossless-crop option if you have it.

The casing for book titles should match that of Wikibook's scheme for titles, that is, title-case (e.g. "Fish and Chips"). Keeping page names in sentence-case violates Wikibook's page naming convention, see the manual of style. To make linking easier, redirect pages should be created, so links to either title appear as "blue" active links, and duplicate pages are not created. At least one contributor prefers actions ("Boiling", not "Boil" or "Boiled") in gerund form. They also advocate keeping ingredient lists in lower-case.

Convert units

Leave the original units as they are, whatever they may be, and add the new units in parentheses after them. Unit conversion requires more care than most people expect. A "Large" egg in the USA is about the same as a "size M" egg in the EU; you should remove the size indication if you believe it refers to one of these normal sizes. The USA uses Queen Anne units, while Britain uses imperial (and metric) units. Imperial units are generally about 20% larger than Queen Anne units, so look for signs of a non-USA recipe author (based on food terms and spelling) before you convert the units. Be aware of the distinction between ounces (mass or weight) and fluid ounces. Proportion is important: if you convert 1/2 t as 2 mL then use 4 mL for 1 t and 190 mL for 1 c, but if you convert 1/2 t as 3 mL then use 6 mL for 1 t and 285 mL for 1 c. Adjust the pan size, serving count, and eggs (ouch) as required to match.

Get junk pages deleted, and save the legit pages

Simply add {{Delete|your reason goes here}} to the top of any page that no reasonable person might want to keep.

Link from Wikipedia to Recidemia

Many topics (recipe, ingredient, tool, activity) discussed here in these recipes are also covered in Wikipedia. From a page over there, you can link to this wiki. Best practices is to do this at the very top of an "External links" section.