Cookbook:Grunt Work

Building and maintaining this cookbook requires work, some of which is tedious. It is good to pitch in, doing your part to take care of things. Here are some of the many things you can do.

Stop spammers and vandals

Monitor the recent changes page to check for edits to the Cookbook. There is a drop-down menu near the top of the list that lets you select a the Cookbook namespace specifically. You can undo bad edits by navigating to the history of a page. Report obvious vandalism in the administrative assistance reading room.

Improve pages

Check the categories containing cookbook stubs and other pages needing improvement, and make improvements as appropriate.

Nominate and judge potential editors

Requests for permissions require votes. Without votes, progress tends 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 who seem decent to you.

Add pictures

It's important to illustrate the Cookbook to help readers learn about the described materials.

Ingredients and tools

These can be illustrated using any suitable images on Wikimedia Commons. If you find a suitable image that has a license compatible with Commons, you can import it there for use in the Cookbook. You may also upload images you take yourself. After you have an appropriate image on Commons, you can add it to the Cookbook page.

Recipes

For recipes, you should not use a generic image to illustrate the specific dish described—you want to show the reader exactly what a given recipe makes. As such, you should cook the recipe yourself, photograph it in high quality, and upload the images. As above, images can be stored at the Wikimedia Commons to make images available for all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

When taking pictures, try to use something other than a yellowish 60W light bulb and Xenon flash. Natural sunlight, GE Reveal bulbs, and most full-spectrum 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.

Standardize formatting and add links

Ensure all pages conform to the Cookbook style and formatting standards. All cookbook pages should have a cookbook navigation template at the top (see Template:Recipe, Template:Ingredient, Template:Equipment, etc). Add category links at the bottom of the page. Use <br clear="all" /> if you need to keep pictures from spilling into the wrong section. Link all ingredients, units of measurement, and equipment the first time they are used.

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.

Recipe description

Many recipes are poorly described, and beginning cooks cannot imagine what the result is supposed to be like. You can describe the recipe in the lead section at the top of the recipe. You can discuss your own cooking attempts on the recipe's talk page. It can also be helpful to describe difficulty levels, preparation times, and other characteristics in Template:Recipe summary.

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 (weight) and fluid ounces (volume). Proportion is important: if you convert ½ tsp as 2 mL then use 4 ml for 1 tsp and 190 ml for 1 cup, but if you convert ½ tsp as 3 ml then use 6 ml for 1 tsp and 285 ml for 1 cup. Adjust the pan size, serving count, and eggs 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. If there has been significant human effort put into the page, you should instead place the page up for a deletion vote and use {{RFD}} to mark the page. At the WB:RFD page, you can also vote on other pages that have been put up for a deletion vote. Be sure to vote based on the quality of the page and not your personal preferences; for example, a vegetarian should not use their personal aversion to meat to advocate for deleting meat-related pages.

Link from Wikipedia to the Cookbook

Many topics (recipe, ingredient, tool, activity) discussed here in the Cookbook are also covered at Wikipedia. From a page over there, you can link to a cookbook page called Cookbook:Example by using {{cookbook|Example}} to make the link. This should be placed at the very top of an "External links" section, alongside other similar sister project templates; the result will be a box on the right side of the page. See the template page for more advanced usage.