I started to track and repair all dutch new additions to OFF. And time permitting I go back to old additions (working on 2021) now).
There are multiple observations to be made:
No product is complete. There is always something to add or repair
Missing images is the largest issue. Any app should force users to take pictures. Many products have no information whatsoever. Often these products have english as main language.
If a product has no images, but a product name, the category and main language can be inferred.
The data that is already there has few errors. A mixup between portion size and 100 g sometimes occurs. The language of the labels can have errors. And assigned category can be wrong.
People have the habit of adding the brand to the product name.
Th nutritional values are sometimes partially filled in, although all the information is available.
The name of the packaging to be used is not always clear. Should I call it a film or a wrapper for instance. Some guidance on accepted packaging names would be useful.
A lot of products have the wrong main language, usually in english. Would it be possible to make a bot that corrects this?
Non-dutch products, like polish, or russian. Not much that I go do with these. I might recognise the category
Products with an english description, which should not be there. Always added by application INF.
The sales country is often strange. I did see products bought by dutch holidaymakers in France.
The popup category type-ahead suggestions do not always offer the right choices. This is due to the language constructs and alphabetical order used. We should implement a better method.
Some apps convert nutritional values to a float format, which introduces rounding errors: 0,7999999.
Great feedback, thanks a lot @aleene. May I ask you to organize your feedback into categories such as:
data completeness
data errors
data gathering issues
or others/more categories you would find more relevant/useful
What would be the most annoying for you?
The popup category type-ahead suggestions do not always offer the right choices. This is due to the language constructs and alphabetical order used. We should implement a better method.
Is it only concerning Dutch language? Can you give some examples?
I also think this should be more like a fuzzy search. Even in french it was really difficult to get right category. Like you don’t know if you should add “confiture de fruit” or “confiture d’abricot” because after typing “confiture”, you get lot of suggestions with other fruits or variety. Maybe the dialog should also take into account if category is more general or more specific to give ranking.
@aleene thanks for the summary, I recognize these points.
Regarding different language entries, there seems to be a (Belgian?) user that uses the app in French and thus entries are started in French despite the packages being Dutch. Similar situations occur with English, perhaps because people prefer the English app language or are foreigners living in the Netherlands. I can fix it by creating a proper entry in Dutch, but it would be nice to clean up irrelevant languages or mark them for deletion.
I try to get products complete but it is not clear for me what information is missing, so it is not actionable. Perhaps I should read some more on the wiki.
Some brand names are like aliases, like Albert Heijn, which is frequently abbreviated to AH.
I recognize the bad category suggestions, I have downloaded the category list from the source code and search through that come up with categories, so that I don’t have to rely on the automatic suggestions.
This could be something that we could try to solve with the upcoming brands taxonomy, where we could try to add support for country specific aliases (today we only have language specific things in taxonomies though).