Interestingly, long was commented
What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that.
All the complaints about the quality of the recipes or the lack of more in-depth explaination of each one, some kind of voting/reputation system for the recipes and for the submitters and the voters, Yes those are all good ideas to make the db more useful than just a db.
But you have to start somewhere. How is the core idea here of a public cookbook not fundamentally awesome? I mean hello... GIT. Recipes that are living documents that can be honed over time, complete with viewable history of what changes have been made so you can decide if you agree with them. Branches and forks for all the hundred variations on any given thing. Revisions by better experts than the original submitter of some recipe.
So, today on day one it doesn't already have the benefit of years of contributions and incremental improvements and revisions, Quelle Suprise!
To add a recipe, you need to a learn markdown and create a PR. Learning markdown might not be hard, but learning to create a pull request, after creating a github account might put them off.