A Working Moderation System is the Priority

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I’m going to leave a record here of a case that happened today, maybe to serve as example in the future, as it’s with cases like these that we get to understand why Open Food Facts isn’t working and what’s really wrong with it. It happened with Macrofactor, although it’s really about the site.

A great job with the pictures (very difficult to work with) and the information meticulously filled-in for 12 languages and 13 countries. I had a commendable work right here:

Macrofactor comes in, submits two complete garbage “pictures,” where the package has not changed in any way whatsoever compared to the recently submitted previous pictures, selects those garbage pictures in place of the extremely high quality ones, adds a non-existing serving size not on the package, and deletes/messes up the previously correct nutritional values.

All the work that I contribute to the site is regularly thrown in the garbage in this manner. When it’s not macrofactor, of course, it’s foodvisor, it’s grumpf, it’s all the others. It happens regularly, it happens weekly, it happens every day. The one day I’m not relentlessly patrolling the work done, these garbage edits come in and ruin it. On Wikipedia, given that this is one of the most popular products on the site, the article would be Protected. Wikipedia locks up highly popular articles from getting edited by unregistered and inexperienced users. With this locked up, this trashing would not be possible. That is why Wikipedia works and Open Food Facts doesn’t.

The priority is getting a working moderation system in place, because, currently, nothing contributed to the site survives. All contributions are in vain, as they get systematically undone. The site begs you to contribute, but when you do, it trashes your work. The godsent new Revert button is impressive, although not enough. As so many users have noted before, it would take far too much time to check all the languages, countries, labels and details to ensure that everything is back to how it was after edits like these are made. Because of the unfeasible amount of time and work that constantly checking on what was already done requires, the superficial one-click Revert is the only option.

There’s nothing against Macrofactor here, as this is just commenting to highlight the inapt foundation in which a giant database is being built. It’s eagerly campaigning to add more stories to a skyscraper on some wooden logs on wetlands.

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Hi @October-Food-Facts,

Thanks for your interesting feedbacks!

Yes I understand it is frustrating. I’m also daily facing such situations.

But we have to know what is the best for the project. Open Food Facts has been build with the ease of collecting data in mind. There should be as few barriers to contribute as possible. That made our success. When you add things such as form controls or locked products or whatever, you can discourage contribution, and we don’t want that.

We already have many mechanisms for data quality:

As a frequent contributor, I am also frustrated about bad data entered by apps or users, but isn’t it the price to keep the contribution barrier low?

As a wikipedia contributor since 2003, I can tell you that Wikipedia moderation also took years to be implemented – and it’s still an ongoing effort. Things take time. And locking products is a big decision that should be discussed.

Locking products can also create frustration: why can’t I modify this product while the data are false/outdated? => this WILL happen.

Before discussing product’s locking, there might be better ways to understand and improve the situation:

What I suggest is to open issues or feature requests to be discussed. The more concrete and documented they are, the more chance they have to be developped by the team and/or by the community.

Open Food Facts is a collaborative effort. Every one is trying to do its best. Apps are also looking for good quality data, it’s also their interest to provide good data to their users. No-one wants to break things or throw your work in the garbage.
We just have to give clear feedback and have gentle discussions with all the people involved. :slight_smile:

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Thank you for the reply. This way, I think I might share more concerns in the future. It’s just that I don’t have much time to do so. There are so many things that I could point out.

I can break down things into simple steps. I have three points relatively easy to embrace, with the last two being very important to me:

  • ability to Revert to older revisions while keeping new pictures, requiring only an additional new prompt after the one currently implemented (I commented on your GitHub page expanding on this, as I didn’t know of that particular page)
  • ability to see, for each old revision, what was the main language, so that it can be brought back without having to tediously research it again, as it’s a lot of work to figure out and decide what the best main language is, with poor edits almost always changing it (I don’t know the GitHub page for this and don’t have the time to make one)
  • stopping edits where the changelog presents no changes made, where one cause is saving the page without changing anything, to spare some of the moderation work of checking on every change that app users do (I also don’t know the GitHub page for this and don’t have the time to make one)

I would love stopping edits with no changes from being possible, as in my country one foodless user does it very often and for many products, adding much unnecessary moderation work.

Also, as a quick question, are you familiar with the frequent rewrites to the most popular products on the site? An user comes in and changes the main language to Bulgarian or Russian and rewrites a number of things. The Alesto and Alpro brands are always there getting poorly edited, needing to have a guardian on a full-time watch. I just want to know if you too are familiar with this fact, because if you know exactly what I’m talking about, then than leaves me less worried. Just research the very long edit history of the most popular products, or keep an eye out to understand how Alesto and Alpro products are edited poorly time and time again. It’s just one thing that stands out about Open Food Facts, because, on Wikipedia, the most popular articles are the best written ones.

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An abusive account, jimminycricket, was recently reported on the Slack contributors channel, although other reports of other users have been made before too. The site isn’t handling these abusive accounts, giving them a free hand. I read the report and I see the desperation and the loss of a real contributor’s effort. Urgency to act is lacking in this matter. There’s vandalism being allowed in one hand and illegally uploaded pictures in mass on the other. When it comes to picture copyright, where you have to be strict, when I first stepped on the site, the first thing that I noticed were the hundreds of illegal uploads from foodvisor and thaialagata, currently ongoing. Nowadays, websites that take no action on illegally submitted content should have no future on the internet, much less be eligible to receive funding.
Here, as seen with this jimminycricket situation, moderators/people are quitting on the site because of this. I hope that I can manage to bring more reports to light to put pressure on the matter, also helping those who are giving up on the site, although I also see myself quitting the cause.

Plea for Action on the Abuse by Jimminycricket
Plea for Action on the Abuse by Jimminycricket1338Ă—288 41.5 KB

https://i.imgur.com/m0EtIiT.png