What should Ingredients text really contain? Should we add sentences like for allergies to ingredience or not?

[rugk]

IMHO that is one of the first questions I was confused about.

In German it shows this help text:

Behalten Sie die ursprüngliche Reihenfolge.
Geben Sie, wenn angegeben, den Prozentsatz
an. Trennen Sie mit einem Komma oder
Bindestrich, verwenden Sie Klammern für
Bestandteile einer Zutat und geben Sie
Allergene zwischen Unterstrichen an.

Translated to English:

Keep the original order.
If specified, enter the percentage
if indicated. Separate with a comma or
hyphen, use brackets for
components of an ingredient and indicate
allergens between underscores.

Questions:

• "indicate allergens between underscores" – this does not explain whether I can/should add that in addition (So write _eggs_? After all the OCR does not do that and cannot you just get from the name that is is an allergen?) Because before it says "stay to the original" for everything basically, so this would be the only rule, where you have to add some formatting for machines, i.e. this is not "human-readable"/as humans would read it.
• Also, should I now add the prefix (product name often, before "Ingredients:")? And should I add the "Ingredients" prefix itself?
• And should I add the allergen information at the end? This is usually something like "May also contain egg, fish and milk.". (Given this is a sentence, I am always unsure and I saw it sometimes being included and sometimes not. Sometimes also the app/score then showed an error for an unknown ingredient in that sentence so…)

IMHO, this should be clarified in the app/text.

[M123-dev]

Puhh that is a good question. As far as I know, we don't do any major formatting before sending the text to the server.

I'm totally for clarifying in the app, but for the right way to specify I'd rather ask in Slack

[rugk]

I don't have slack due to being a proprietary service, so for a FLOSS project something like Discourse or so would probably be better – but that's off-topic. Could anyone forward it to the appropriate people?

[M123-dev]

The Slack link, if any other Person is interested

https://openfoodfacts.slack.com/archives/C06A7LENM/p1704016465602629

Waiting for responses

[M123-dev]

@rugk here the answer from Slack, in form of a screenshot to make the discussion easier to follow

[rugk]

So no underscores.

What about "Ingredients:" prefix?
And what about the "allergen information at the end"?

(see my OP)

[M123-dev]

The ingredients prefix should not be included, we send it to the server marked as ingredients after all, but it shouldn't be a problem including it. I am very certain it will be filtered out.

I forwarded the last question👍🏻

[M123-dev]

My understanding was that our policy was to put the traces ("may also contain etc.") in the Traces field and not in the Ingredients one.
For now, the automatic OCRing is not clever enough to do that properly though, so a lot of products in the database have the sentence about the traces at the end of the ingredients list.
I don't know if the current consensus is that:
it is a temporary situation and we will in the end manage to separate the traces from the ingredients or
we have to accept the current market practice to list traces almost as ingredients and stop trying to separate them

[M123-dev]

@vince true, that is how it should be in the end. However @benben has been working on parsing the ingredients and it will extract the traces if they are entered in the ingredients.

---

There is a variable called "may_contain_regexps" in the Ingredients.pm file that contains stopwords before the traces for each languages.

Ideally, everyone should just select the ingredients area and extract.
Then, review and correct manually
And if it does not work for traces because the stopword is not in the aforementioned variable, if it is easy for you to add it as a new stopword then feel free to do it. If it is not easy, just post it on Slack or create an issue on github and someone else will do it.

Super Marvin that you take the time to respond to contributors 👍

For the message next to the ingredient box. It is slightly different in the app and on the website https://de.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/product.pl?type=edit&code=4000215813248
But this is more or less same information. I agree that it could be updated, especially for the App. Most important is that people extract it and correct typos or delete text after and before ingredients list if needed.

The fact that we can use underscore to put in bold, if it is not needed it could be moved somewhere else instead (on a wikipage for example).