Recipes Wiki talk:Rules

I would like to propose the following policy rules so that:
 * 1) Recipe titles must be in title case format.
 * 2) Use abberivations for units (eg. g, oz, cm, lb).
 * 3) Don't abberivate cups, tablespoons and teaspoons.
 * 4) The recipes must be formatted according to the proposed Manual of Style.

If no one comment on proposals after 1 week, I'll modify the policy page. Android 1123581321 (talk) 18:12, 20 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Hello.Thanks for taking the time to think about some additional rules. I don't know what you mean by titles in 'Title Case Format' specifically -- do you mean no special characters? There aren't a huge number of those; I'm not sure it needs to be a rule. Nor do I know what you mean by the proposed Manual of Style, unless it is all the abbreviations you propose?


 * In terms of the abbreviations, it makes absolutely no sense to me to require them in one case and forbid them in the other. My instinct for consistency (and brevity) is to abbreviate all units, including cups, tablespoons and teaspoons (which are units also, and have standard abbreviations that are in common use). But again, I don't particularly see why this should be a requirement, any more than requiring which measuring system is used. -- Wendy (talk) 01:52, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi, I want to know that "cups" are more legible than "c". That goes the same for "tablespoons" instead of "tbsp" or "Tbs" or "T"; and "teaspoons" instead of "tsp" or "t". Android 1123581321 (talk) 07:21, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * No more so than 'grams' vs 'g' or 'ounces' vs 'oz'. I appreciate that you personally find 'g' legible and 'T' not, but they are all standard cooking abbreviations, and there is no need to change to a less uniform standard.
 * In the meanwhile, making these changes is counter-productive, particularly when you have been told that the existing community (me currently; and the many editors who have previously worked on the wiki in the past) disagrees with what you want to change. Many of your edits are helpful, but this is not. -- Wendy (talk) 18:01, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Wendy It's been a week since the last comment, so I will change the policy so that:
 * Abberivate all units.
 * Recipe titles must be in title case format.
 * The recipes must be formatted according to the Manual of Style.
 * If you are confused about the new rules, please let us know. Android 1123581321 (talk) 07:27, 30 August 2023 (UTC)


 * You never answered my question about the title case, so we did not discuss it, but I assume you mean to capitalize major words and not minor ones. While I agree that I would probably choose this if I were building a wiki from scratch, that is actually not the style of this wiki as it currently exists. Currently Recipes pages have all major words capitalized, and glossary pages and food categories do not (eg. Whipped Cream vs. Whipped cream, or Category:Beef steak Recipes).  The page name convention is somewhat useful to distinguish ingredient pages from recipes for those ingredients. The categories reflect the ingredient page names.  I did not set this system up, but there are many many thousands of pages and categories that would have to be adjusted to change it, and even more pages which would have to be edited to change the category tags.  And some new convention would have to be found to distinguish ingredients and recipes.


 * While I prefer to abbreviate all units, as I said above, it has much the same problem as the titles - thousands upon thousands of existing pages where things are abbreviated non-uniformly. The only difference is that it is relatively less painful to try to fix these; still it would take a long time to fix all of them. I just don't see the point of making a 'rule' that is broken everywhere already.


 * I have addressed both issues in the manual of style instead of making them rules.


 * A manual of style is a good idea, but the recipe page layout you propose is actually not at all typical: almost none of the recipes have an equipment section, and the only real requirement is that there be an ingredients section and a directions section. Everything else is easy to fix/add, and optional.


 * I do not like including the source 'template' and have removed it. For one thing, relatively few editors use the source editor, and those that do can almost certainly generate it on their own. Copying that template into the regular editor will create a mess. For another, it just looked ugly on the page.  If you feel very strongly that it should exist, then please create a subpage (eg. Recipes Wiki:Rules/Sample_Recipe) that can be linked.


 * I hope you can agree with these changes. Fundamentally I'd rather encourage contributions, even if they are a bit messy, than make it prohibitively complicated to add a new recipe because there are so many rules.  -- Wendy (talk) 04:03, 31 August 2023 (UTC)