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I have wanted to build something like this, but the real pain point to solve is recipe blogs are a pain to navigate. They’re covered in ads, popups, and the first 50% of the page is some story that nobody wants to read.

What we need is wikipedia for cooking.



The problem with that is that recipes are inherently more like blog than Wikipedia articles - they're so personal. Who are you to edit the number of chillies in OJFord's palak paneer, for example?

Wikipedia has a 'first come first stays' policy for British/American spelling - applying that to recipes would be disastrous, giving me the final say on how to make the de facto custard, just because I created the page before anyone else?


Fair points, I'm not saying all of Wiki's policies need to apply. I'm just saying the format and ease of consuming content is good, and there's nothing popular for cooking with those qualities.


Yes, sorry if I seemed too dismissive, I agree and like the idea on the surface, it's just to me what makes the format and ease of consuming Wikipedia good is that there's one page for everything, not a bunch of conflicting entries for the same thing. (Well, any encyclopaedia!)

But you can't achieve that with recipes, because they're not encyclopaedic entries, they're one person's opinion piece on how to make a nice <whatever>, like a blog post.

I suppose the slight flaw in my argument is that you can have competing encyclopaedia publishers - choose your namespace, your single source of truth, within which there's the one entry...


There's probably ways to handle that. Grouping variations together and letting the community rank them for example. It's not a new problem


It's an expensive paid subscription, but the America's Test Kitchen website is basically a professionally maintained cooking information index. The standards of information are much higher than a wiki (they do scientific method testing of every tool, technique and recipe). Unfortunately there is one thing that annoys me, which is that there are full page ads for their other products, even if you are already a subscriber.


As an Indian, I've found some of their Indian food recipes on Youtube to be downright terrible.


I wouldn't know- I ask my mom for Indian recipes, and she gets them from other Indian moms on YouTube. I use ATK for western food, especially southern food.




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