Talk to me about Ingredient Wiki, people

As some of you old timers know, the Ingredient Wiki was a bit of a passion project for me. My belief was that between our team and the community, we'd be able to create a world class, culinary focused reference for chef's ingredients. The reality is that, although some of you have made fantastic contributions, overall it hasn't been a spectacular success. We usually only see a few edits per week, and content is pretty spotty. We can talk about lots of reasons why this might be the case, but the truth is we have enough other priorities that I couldn't deeply invest in making it better now anyhow.

The wiki has two parts: a gallery page (http://www.chefsteps.com/ingredients), and individual ingredient pages that are linked from ingredient blocks in recipes (like http://www.chefsteps.com/ingredients/sodium-tripolyphosphate).

In the short run, I'd like to remove the gallery page. It garners only 0.1% of the pageviews on the site, and it isn't integrated with the new recipe gallery (http://www.chefsteps.com/gallery), so it is a maintenance cost. How many of you feel strongly that this is an important feature on the site for you personally? It could eventually resurface as part of a unified gallery with recipes, classes, etc if there is enough demand.

In the long run, we need to make a decision on whether to keep the actual ingredient pages or get rid of them and just have the ingredient blocks link out to places on the web where you can purchase products.

Please let me know your thoughts on any/all of the above - especially how/whether it affects you personally.

Thanks,
Michael

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Comments

tshewman

Perhaps not the best answer, but I would vote keeping them in some form. My understanding is it's basically a scaled down version of Bullpedia (?) which in the long term could be a great thing. Pick an ingredient and choose "what is it", or "how can I cook it", or "anatomy/chemistry of the ingredient" and people could decide how deep they want to go. That's in the ideal world, so personally I wouldn't scrap it. My personal lack of contribution to that portion is quite frankly, not enough personal bandwidth (life gets in the way), but ultimately, am as passionate about it as many I believe (FWIW).

pepealberola

I appreciate the information, and like it when it is linked to ingredients in a recipe. So I would like this part to be kept.

I had not even realized there was an ingredient gallery, so I will not miss it...(but maybe that is part of the problem with the low page views, people do not even know it exists?)

bkeene12

Something is amiss with this resource. I have been around since March 2014 and have never came across it till you pointed it out. Perhaps you might want to take a closer look at how the 0.1% is getting to the page. I took a look at the links you included and feel, if I knew they existed, I would of utilized them.

Samuel_68313

I still love the wiki, even though it is not as good as I think any of us expected it would be. I still hope it can become something fantastic.

GaryT_92514

I was aware of the ingredients wiki in the early stages, but it fell off my radar. In fact, I haven't been able to find the link to it now (it's not listed under 'resources' for example, where I might have expected it). I also wasn't aware of a separate gallery, and if I click on the link in the above post I get a blank page (Safari). In hunting around the site I came across the blog, which is hidden in the page footer. So, maybe some of ChefSteps 'hidden features' could do with a boost? But, I understand there are many priorities to juggle...

richard.fine

Heh, I actually recently started contributing to the ingredient wiki

Kill the gallery page, but I'd say keep the ingredient pages. It would help if you make the activity on them a bit more obvious, i.e. a 'latest ingredient updates' box on the home page or similar. Stuff to make me go "someone said you're supposed to cook pork steaks to 80C? LIES" and go get involved etc.

FrankM_3301

My 2cents: I clicked on your first link...crickets...nothing appears...second link worked. I think the idea is a good one...and could even see it developed into a database that allows users to identify which ingredient pairs with other ingredients, a la "The Flavor Bible" or "Foodpairing". I would use that often! I think the suggestions below, of making more obvious on the site, are necessary. But (and I am sure you know this already), you probably need to dedicate a staff person to making it happen. Community editing/contribution is great, but in-house management is probably necessary to realize your vision. Someone in charge could add, edit, talk it up, integrate it with content, run contests to add content and promote use...etc.

Chris_B__201570

I'm a new user and have never seen the gallery page, but the individual ingredient pages were a nice little surprise.

Honestly, even if there's little manual input, the stuff that appears to be added automatically is really cool (Used In, Often Used With, etc.). I was also impressed at how smart the system seems to be at avoiding duplicates. Like, there aren't 10 entries for salt: "Salt, coarse"; "Coarse salt"; "Salt (coarse)" and so on, like you sometimes see. Not sure if that's automated or just careful manual curation, but it's nice!

So I vote to keep them, too. The automated stuff on stub pages is interesting all by itself, and the stuff added by volunteers is icing on the cake. Maybe throw in an automatic Amazon referral link and a "Read more on Wikipedia" link, and just let the volunteer stuff come in at its current pace. (If you ever did want to to sink more dev time into it, how about a points system? "Gamify" the wiki, as they say.)

michaelnatkin

Yep, I'd already removed the gallery page by the time you commented

michaelnatkin

(I already removed the gallery - not sure why it is showing a blank page instead of the 404 page, I'll look at that.)

com-chefsteps

Late to the thread, but I'd add that the Ingredient wiki is my top "this has potential if only it catches on" part of the site. One page that describes the source, cultural history, chemical makeup, and techniques of [X ingredient] sounds awesome to me. I'd contribute more, but I resist under the guise of non-expertise.

gabor.szeder

Every once in a while I try to click my way trough the ChefSteps site to find the list of entries in the ingredients wiki, to no avail. Now I know why. That's a pity, really, but at least now I know not to try it again in the future.

FWIW, one of the most useful features of the ingredients wiki is that for each ingredient there are links to recipes using it. This greatly helps to judge whether I really want a particular ingredient and how much I might need in the foreseeable future, which, in turn, helps when e.g. I try to amortize the cost of overseas shipping over multiple ingredients that are hard to source locally. The list of ingredients would make this (i.e. mapping the product line of an online store to ChefSteps recipes) all the more convenient. Not to mention including ingredients wiki pages in the search results.

Apparently you could also benefit from such a list to name the ingredients in your recipes consistently. As it is there are a few ingredients with multiple wiki pages, e.g. "Insta Cure No. 1" and "Prague Powder No. 1", or "Kelcogel F (low-acyl gellan gum)" and "Low-acyl gellan gum".