Cooking Consensus: Will Wiki Work in the Kitchen?

New sites try to do to recipes what Wikipedia did to encyclopedia entries. Will it fly with food?

Photo-illustration for Time by Tamara Shopsin

We shocked the academic experts by writing excellent encyclopedia entries on Wikipedia, so why can't amateurs, if we all work together, create perfect recipes? If enough of us discuss and debate our hamburger knowledge — our meat choices, cooking methods, spices, condiments, bread — then won't our collective experience create the Platonic burger? That's one of the goals of two websites — Foodista.com and the recipe section of Wikia.com — that allow users to post new recipes and revise existing ones any way they want, forming a great burger consensus.

But as is not the case with...

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