Editorial Policy

How cookiki's pages are written and checked, where the photos come from, how errors are corrected, and the rules for editing a recipe.

How recipes are written

Written by AI, directed by the operator. Recipe text is written by an AI model working under the direction of the site's operator, who decides which dishes are added and what is published. Every recipe page states that it was written with AI and links to this page.
How a dish is chosen. The first dishes were simply widely known ones. New dishes are picked to fill gaps rather than by fame: a cooking technique the site does not explain yet, or a kind of dish a cuisine is missing (a country with mains but no soup, say). A dish is left out if no freely licensed photo of it can be found, or if its page would only restate a technique another page already covers.
Where a dish is from. The country shown on a dish is based on the dish's encyclopedia article; when the article names it a country's national dish, that country is used. Some well-known dishes, such as baklava or hummus, are claimed by several countries, and for those the country shown is a way to browse by cuisine, not a ruling on where the dish began. Dishes added now are left out when their origin is disputed or the article only places them in a region that crosses borders. A dish with no encyclopedia article is added only when its origin is not in dispute.
What a recipe page contains. Ingredients and steps are stored in a structured form, so quantities rescale with the servings and the page can be searched. After the steps, Variations covers regional versions and substitutions, and Tips explains the steps that decide the result and why, linking the guide that covers the technique where there is one.
Checks before publishing. Each new recipe goes through a script that looks for errors that have actually happened before: formatting that would print as stray symbols, a missing photo credit, a missing search entry, a step timer too long to make sense. Every link to another page on the site is checked against the database, so that none leads to a missing page.
Checks after publishing. Published pages are re-read, with AI assistance, against the site's own guides and against the other recipes they refer to, looking for contradictions, statements that have gone out of date, and food-safety gaps. Confirmed problems are corrected in the page, and in any guide that had repeated them.
Two original languages. Original pages are written in Korean and English. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese and Chinese pages are AI translations of the English originals, and each says so. The two pages for a dish cover the same recipe but are not line-by-line translations of each other, so their tips can differ in detail.
Confirmed errors are corrected, and readers can report them — see Accuracy and corrections below.

How the guides and ingredient entries are written

The cooking-basics guides and the ingredient entries are also written by an AI model under the operator's direction.

Topics come from the recipes. A guide topic is chosen by counting how many recipes rely on a technique — salting, browning, thickening, soaking — and taking the most common first. An ingredient entry is chosen by how often the ingredient appears in recipe ingredient lists. A topic a guide already covers does not get a second, thinner page.
Linked both ways. A guide links to the recipes that demonstrate it, and those recipes link back to the guide. When a recipe's ingredient list names an ingredient that has an entry, the line links to it automatically.
Re-read against the recipes that cite them. Each guide is re-read against the recipes that cite it. When a recipe documents an exception to a rule the guide stated as general, the guide is corrected or extended rather than left contradicting the recipe.
Guides and ingredient entries are not open to wiki editing. To correct one, email contact@cookiki.com.

Photos

Every recipe photo is a freely licensed photograph by someone else — in the public domain or under an open licence such as CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA — mostly from Wikimedia Commons, some from Flickr.
They are not photos of our own cooking, so the dish in a photo can differ in detail from the recipe. Where the two differ, follow the recipe.
The author, the licence and a link to the original file are shown under each photo. Where a licence requires attribution, that line is the attribution.
We do not use photos we cannot attribute. A photo is not chosen if its author or licence cannot be established, if it carries a watermark or legible branding, if someone is facing the camera, or if it does not actually show the dish.
If you took one of these photos and want the credit changed or the photo removed, email contact@cookiki.com.

Editing recipes and moderation

Editing requires Google sign-in; anonymous edits are not allowed.
Edits go live immediately, without pre-approval.
Before an edit is saved, an automated spam filter checks it, and it is normally also read by an AI review (currently Anthropic's Claude). Both are set up to refuse spam and vandalism, and the AI review is also instructed to refuse edits written in the other language and edits that remove a safety warning or a salt level, temperature or time a preserve depends on for safety. Neither check is perfect, which is one reason every edit is kept in the history.
Links to other websites cannot be added; links to pages on this site can. Cite a source in words instead.
Every edit is kept in the page history and can be reverted in one click. Accounts that repeatedly abuse editing can be blocked.

Taste vs. standard

Recipes are less about right-or-wrong facts than a spectrum of tastes. So instead of everyone rewriting one page to their liking, we capture that variety with a few rules.

Keep the main recipe (base) as the most common standard — please don't overwrite it to your personal taste.
Add your own spin under a "Variations" section, and small know-how under "Tips".
Prefer ranges over a single "correct" amount (e.g. chili powder 1–2 tbsp, to taste).

Accuracy and corrections

Food safety comes first. Where a recipe touches safety — raw or undercooked meat, fish and eggs, ingredients that are only safe once cooked through, preserving and fermenting, how long food can sit out — that statement takes priority over everything else on the page, and a report about it is dealt with before any other.
How errors are fixed. When an error is confirmed, whether a check or a reader found it, the page is corrected, and so is any guide or other recipe that repeated it.
How to report one. Edit the recipe directly, or email contact@cookiki.com with the page address and what is wrong. Guides and ingredient entries can only be corrected by email.
Times and temperatures in a recipe are a starting point. Stoves, ovens and ingredients vary, so check doneness by the signs the steps describe, not only by the clock.