Adding Food Facts to Open Food Facts
Open Food Facts and Why I Picked It
For my contribution, I made some changes to the Open Source Project, Open Food Facts. This project is a database that plans to compile as much information about food products as it can. It lists many important pieces of information regarding food, such as ingredients, allergens, country of origin, etc. Its goal is to give people a place to look up many different types of food they may be interested in and immediatedly know if it’s, say, vegan, vegetarian, or contains an ingredient they can’t consume.
When I found this project, it looked very interesting simply for what it set out to do. I personally know a lot of people who have many allergies, and this seems like a useful place that they would be able to use if they weren’t quite sure if a snack was ok for them to eat. I saw this project and saw that there was a lot of things to contribute to since this doesn’t seem to be that out there.
Despite some messy documentation about contributions and how to get started, it’s fairly well equipped to get you on your way very quickly. And contributing itself can be very simple, making it pretty beginner-friendly.
Contribution
I decided to find one of the foods listed on the site and make edits to it. They have an entire list of items that are only partially complete or need review, which you can go right in and edit. In addition, their GitHub has many different bug fixes and the like, so there’s a little more to find there as well!
Starting Out
I chose Mug Root Beer, one of the items on display that needed edits. There’s a lot of things they want filled out, like the manufacturer, expiration date (the idea seems to be to constantly update the expiration date for data tracking and to get a sense of how long it lasts), and nutrition facts, to name a few.
Making Edits
Since this is open to anyone, some information is already listed out on the actual page, although some of it had some grammatical errors and mistakes that needed correcting. For example, there is a table of information that wants the nutrition facts, but the previous contributor used grams instead of milligrams as the unit of measure, which is one of the reasons the root beer was flagged for correction.
Submission
After I was done with my edits, I hit save and submit, and it seemed to go through well enough. This site apparently doesn’t need any sort of moderator verification nor do you have to have it approved. It added my changes to the changelog and that was that. You don’t need to go through the GitHub, which seems to be reserved strictly for bugs and/or new features. Overall a pretty fun project to contribute to due to how information like this can be incredibly important for so many people.
