Create a "recipes" meta site

Question

So we have fairly strong support for the idea that recipe requests (AKA "recipe-swapping" questions) should be out of scope for the main site. I'd prefer not to rehash the rationale; for anyone who's not familiar with this subject, please see the following:

• Should “I need a recipe for X?” questions be off-topic?
• Restaurant mimicry questions allowed?
• What should our FAQ contain?

Thing is - there's also some pretty heavy resistance to the idea:

• Why is recipe swapping a bad thing?
• Something strange and is the scope of the site to narrow?
• ...and various answers and comments in the first set of links.

I think it's hard to argue that, in the big-picture view, a large number of recipe requests would be bad for the site. But I can see this argument dragging on for a long time (think SO and career advice), and major disagreements like that are also going to be bad for the site.

So I propose that we meet these people halfway: Create a dedicated recipe site that works like meta.

The way I see it, this makes sense on every level:

• Migration is a more polite response to newbies than closing their questions;

• It should satisfy the dissenters;

• It eliminates any possibility of rep- or badge-farming (since rep is derived from the parent site, and badges don't carry over);

• It eliminates front-page clutter;

• The recipes would be indexed and searchable;

• It supports voting and ranking, which is probably why some people are so dead-set on using the F&C SE for it.

• People who use the "recipe meta" site would probably be more willing to help migrate recipe requests there instead of arguing or voting to reopen on the parent site. (In other words, we could all be on the same team here.)

• At the very worst, it would stagnate and collect dust - doing no harm to the parent site, but proving that recipe swapping isn't necessary or helpful to the community's survival.

Maybe I'm missing something, but to me, this is win-win. Can we get this implemented ASAP? Or does anybody see any serious problems with it?

Answer 1

From a non-professional chef user's standpoint, I believe this is an excellent idea and I support it.

Answer 2

This is really easy: Area 51 - Recipes.

If the idea gets support, the site will get created.¹ Otherwise it wont.

So go rally the troops.

_{¹ We'll worry about the meta-ness of it later. But, my guess is probably not. Just a regular site.}

Answer 3

A dedicated recipe site would be a great addition to "Food and Cooking" at some point. However, I don't believe the site is mature enough in its young stages to merit a site-specific feature enhancement.

I completely understand why we don't want "Food and Cooking" to become yet-another-recipe-site, hence the idea to have a dedicated portion of the site to handle dedicated recipe swapping. No one wants bad questions to clutter up the site. I also can see the great potential of having a "recipe area" of our site that takes advantage of the fantastic talent pool in the "food and cooking" domain. You could come up with quite the wiki-cookbook of recipes from such a group!

I think, though, that the drama around what types of recipe questions should or should not be allowed is evidence enough of the complexity that will be required to design a good recipe extension to the site. All of the same questions surrounding recipes right now will still apply: Is this a pure recipe question that belongs on recipes.cooking? Is this a question about technique in a recipe or is the technique the entire recipe, and if so, does it belong on recipes.cooking? To what extent does a question have to be a "pure recipe question" before being moved to recipes.cooking?

To implement the solution well (by well, I mean not just a place to dump poorly worded questions that contain the word "recipe"), it would probably require a significant extension to the site. While the cost could potentially be justified later on, the site is certainly too young right now to merit the resources it would take to implement this site-specific extension.

Answer 4

As an amateur cook, there are many times I would like to hear expert opinions on subjective stuff: what are the good brands of cooking chocolate, a good stuffing recipe, which stick blender works, etc... For cases like these we could have a no reputation “question” with one answer that is forced to be a wiki where lists items may be voted on.

Answer 5

I'm in the process of designing a recipe sharing site based in part on the SO vote and ranking model. It's called Fridge to Food and is in the late alpha stages. It indexes recipes based on ingredients, is very image focused allowing anyone to post an image to any recipe, has tagging and keeps track of user cookies. Users gain reputation for recipe upvotes and for image upvotes (less for images, more for recipes).

Like I said, it's still in alpha and isn't even to feature complete beta. However, when finished it could serve much better as a recipe repository than an SE but retain the features that people want from a recipe SE. I've been working on it since November when I got the idea for a ingredient searchable recipe site with SO-like voting, but development's been slower than I like as I've had to maintain a full time job the entire time. First as a programmer and now as a teacher in Thailand.

I've been debating for a while whether or not I wanted to suggest it as a possible recipe repository for a food and cooking SE. I do want to eventually commercialize it (if it is successful) if for no other reason than that I could concentrate on it full time. I'm happy to offer it up as a distant cousin site that could serve as a recipe repository for Food and Cooking Stack Exchange.

If this is out of line somehow, let me know and I'll retract the post. But as long as we're discussing a dedicated recipe Stack Exchange I figured I would offer it. I'd considered using a Stack Exchange for recipes, but figured it would be better to take the features from the SO model that I love and build a dedicated site better suited to recipes.