It is interesting that there is not yet a Wikipedia of recipes. It would be the perfect use case for a wiki. People would love to share their recipes variations and improve/fix existing one.
There would be a standard layout, introduction paragraph would explain the history of a recipe and link to other similar recipes. That would be interesting to read.
And there would be an endless number of recipes. For-profit sites are full of ads and SEO optimized to improve user retention/engagement, which make them annoying to use. A wiki could be print friendly and distraction-free, which would be perfect for a recipe.
I don't think it would make sense to let everyone edit recipes. One person's "improvement" is another person's "travesty". Try adding garlic to carbonara and see what your insult:compliment ratio is.
Not a Wikipedia, but in Germany we have chefkoch.de, which is a commercial user content website which uses a sort of standardized format. As others have pointed out, recipes are not meant to be as canonical as dictionary entries.
Make it a namespaced wiki. Every user can only create and edit recipes in their own namespace, or the namespace of groups they’re a member of (like GitHub treats repos for example).
Then you could, as user, follow users you like. Each recipe would be in structured format, but could also have rich text introductions / explanations, if users wish to add such information.
You could even let users add custom styling to their own namespaces/subwikis, as tumblr, myspace, wordpress, youtube and reddit used to do / still do (with a way to turn this off as user, if you just want the plain content)
This is the way. Publicly read-only repos with easy access to forking and pull requests are far superior to wiki pages with no access controls. Compared to current GitHub you would mainly need to add support for structured data, ratings, and indexing.
I'm not sure, is there not one standard, most accepted recipe and then N variations? Also, I would not except edits to be on ingredients, but mostly on the method. If a user would want to modify ingredients, he could create a his "regional" variation.
But I see the wiki more as a reference book on recipes and their well known variations (which is mostly what I'm looking for when searching for a recipe) than a sharing platform/pseudo social network.
There would be a standard layout, introduction paragraph would explain the history of a recipe and link to other similar recipes. That would be interesting to read.
And there would be an endless number of recipes. For-profit sites are full of ads and SEO optimized to improve user retention/engagement, which make them annoying to use. A wiki could be print friendly and distraction-free, which would be perfect for a recipe.