WikiFood Data Quality Concept

The experiences with Wikipedia have shown, that a community of volunteers can provide a high level of data quality because of the continuous peer review processes.

• Consequently, all information provided by users will be peer reviewed by the user community
• Every editor of WikiFood is required to authenticate himself and provide username and password
• Multiple User Accounts are strongly forbidden
• Each single editing of product information by any user will be logged and visualised
• Published information will be assigned to the editing user.
• Information directly provided by the food producers will be clearly marked
• Pictures with relevant information of each inserted food product will help to validate the information

About food ingredient lists

Thanks to the European legalisation, food producers are obliged to print ingredient lists on the food package. However, food producers are not forced to provide ingredient lists to any governmental or private institution for consumer information or protection. That means that neither a Ministry of Health nor a Ministry of Consumer protection in Europe has access to this kind of information.

According to this, there exists no central database, where ingredients of food products can be looked up by customers and where food producers may publish food related information to public.

Based on the idea of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, we intend to fulfil this important need by providing the free and open food database Wikifood containing information provided by patients and users. WikiFood offers the possibility to collect ingredient information from the affected persons as well as from food producers. Both have high interest in good data quality. EAN-13 Barcodes will be used to identify the food products of each country. This EAN code is printed on the product package in human readable number and in barcode format.