There are two points of relevance here, I think. The first is that yours is one way of consuming recipes, but another is to simply look for news recipe in different cookbooks or, increasingly often, find one at a random food blog. The second is that even collections are very much possible on a wiki, or even outside it, by just compiling links to the wiki articles. For example, I enjoy cookbooks written about a single cuisine (e.g. listing all kinds of Middle Eastern recipes together), because they will then often go well together. One could easily imagine a Wikibooks page compiling related recipes into a recommendation list.

I dunno, a page that lists a bunch of variations on a recipe, curated with some kind of objective ratings system sounds pretty awesome to me.

>Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner

The thing is, after enough experience cooking, you don't need to do this. If you know what the ingredients taste like and you know generally the ratios of each ingredient, you can make a rough estimate of the expected flavour of the final dish in your head. A curated system would help you learn this as you'll start to notice certain ingredients regularly being used in certain situations.

I personally use recipes as a starting point, for most things, some recipes do need to be exact, especially baking recipes, or a general guide. Once i've got a good idea of the main ingredients for a dish I figure out what flavours would add to it.

Cooking doesn't need to be exact, hence why one dish can have 100 different recipes. The secret to cooking is learning the characteristics of different ingredients and how to apply them to your food. Everything in a recipe has a purpose, once you figure out the purpose of different ingredients you can use them sort of without really thinking about them. You start thinking more about the situation of the current dish and what ingredients would go well, rather than what exact recipe you should follow.