Cookbook:Feature requests/Rating and feedback system

As SamSam said about his categorization and filtering suggestion, I have concerns about the cookbook's scalability. From my experience using public recipe sites, I have found that the more recipes they accumulate, the less useful they become. Even with a robust categorization system, the duplicate recipes make it very hard to research what you want to make. Although it may be some work, I suggest that we implement a rating and feedback system as I find this greatly increases a site's usefulness. This idea was inspired by VegWeb (http://vegweb.com), which is a public recipe site that is a pleasure to peruse as compared with other sites such as cooks.com that (http://www.cooks.com) seem sterile due to the lack of public feedback. An open feedback forum on the recipe page is vital for the testing of the recipes and for the opening of dialogue that is so much a part of the creative process of cooking. Variations of recipes can be posted here and a rating system can be implemented for the feedback entries to prioritize entries that people found most useful/informative and to highlight variations on recipes that are most popular. This system should be on the front end and easily accessible to the public, thus not in any way restricted to active builders of the book's content. This would be an excellent way of dealing with the philosophical issue raised by Snowspinner (above) about open-ended vs fixed recipes. I am an advocate for the open-ended approach, but a recipe can get too overwhelming with too much information at once. The original author of a recipe should still be allowed to put in as much extra information as they would like such as variations, cooking techniques, ingredient information, etc. However, a feedback system would be an indispensable way of building this extra information that everyone can learn from.

--Gothicsurf 19:01, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)