We've seen the Wikipedia model applied to car design, a video dictionary and an online publishing platform. The latest? Foodista, an online cooking encyclopedia whose recipes can be edited by anyone.
Launched late last year, Seattle-based Foodista is a collaborative project to build the world's largest, highest-quality cooking encyclopedia. The site says it is the first to organize and cross-link the basic elements of cooking: foods, or the basic ingredients; recipes, or combinations of ingredients; cooking techniques; and kitchen tools. Rather than include hundreds of recipes for the same basic result, however—the way many recipe sites do—Foodista aims instead to perfect a few key recipes through the collaborative editing process. Thousands of high-resolution photos from the Flickr.com Creative Commons currently illustrate the topics on the site—though not the results of specific recipes, as TechCrunch points out—and users can also upload their own photos. Content is fully editable, and a raft of tools aimed at food bloggers include embeddable widgets to forge automated links from Foodista to specific food blogs. Ultimately, Foodista plans to support itself through online advertising.
Will a thousand cooks produce a better recipe, as the site implicitly promises? Or will the collaborative process reduce each of the site's recipes to the most bland, lowest-common-denominator version, as TechCrunch suggests it might? Time will tell. In the meantime, one to watch—or get involved in? (Related: 52 recipe contests to spawn crowdsourced cookbook — Personalized cooking: recipes match cravings — Customized cookbooks stir in online recipes.)
Website: www.foodista.com
Contact: www.foodista.com/contact
Spotted by: Murtaza Ali Patel
BTW Wikipedia has a sister project, which has included cookbook for ages: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents
This looks promosing! Another application of the Wikipedia model is http://www.klusopedia.nl A Dutch wiki for DIY instructions
The wiki model is impressive, motile, and useful. I enjoy the idea of applying it to other ideas like cookbooks and textbooks. I recently came across another one that I like at http://www.casualtourist.com . I ride the bus all the time and it's fun to see a guidebook written for bus travelers by bus travelers. That's the power of wiki!
Hello Murtaza,
Thank you so much for the great article about Foodista.com. We are constantly updating the site and we have a ton of cool projects in the works! We'll be announcing the news in the next couple weeks so stay tuned!
Cheers!
Melissa Peterman
melissa@foodista.com
Editor and Community Developer
www.foodista.com
Foodista- The Cooking Encyclopedia everyone can edit!
Thanks for the mention of Foodista! Ironically, the mass collaborative editing introduced by Wikis is both one of the most successful and counter-intuitive developments of the Web. Even now, few people understand how Wikipedia works; and I would also argue that there’s a lot more subjective opinion than people realize.
While it’s true there's a lot of creativity in cooking, there is also a lot of objective fact, e.g. the boiling/freezing temperatures of water. And, consider how much general agreement exists on what common recipes are. That’s why menus in restaurants work..we know what to expect.
On the factual side at Foodista, we’ve created pages to write about basic foods, cooking techniques, and kitchen tools. When it comes to recipes, we have two types, “public” which anyone can edit and “personal,” which you can lock when you add your original creations. Rather than have a ton of duplication, we’re trying to capture the things people agree on and highlight where there is debate and/or originality. It’s much harder to find a creative version of Goulash if you have to sort through 500 recipes that are 98% identical. As for lowest common denominator, it’s just not what we’re seeing. Most of the editing being done, and needed, is around formatting, punctuation, and spelling…less about fundamentally changing ingredients.
Finally, though we are a Wiki, we have a lot more structure than Wikipedia. We’ve written software to automatically find and discover connections between concepts in cooking. Our goal is to help people learn about both science AND artistry in the kitchen. Check out this little experiment as a fun example: http://www.foodista.com/labs/ingredomatic.cgi?q=apple+pie
Cheers,
Barnaby Dorfman
Founder & CEO
Foodista.com