Countries field should not be free format

[aleene]

What

The countries field determines which countries or regions a product is sold in. Currently the site allows free format entries. This allows users to enter inexistent and faulty entries.

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

Check out the website.

Expected behaviour

Allow only entries from the countries taxonomy.

Why

To many nonsense entries, which require repair, like a lot of rubbish in the countries_tags field returned by the API, e.g. fr:en-fr, en:royaume-uni, fr:dom-tom, en:european-union, de:allemagne, de:švýcarsko, fr:frankreich, en:francia-espana, …

[JagjeevanAK]

@aleene Are you referring to this field?

[github-throwaway]

Relevant slack comment:

Hi everyone,
I’ve compiled a list of mappings for country tags that appear multiple times, linking them to their respective country codes (415 tags → 227 countries). I’m sharing it here in case it’s useful for others as well.
During this process, I came across many tags that don’t correspond to actual countries. Some represent historical countries (e.g., Yugoslavia, Soviet Union), while others are regions within countries (e.g., Scotland, Jersey, Quebec). Also, there are often wrong language prefixes for country names in other languages.
To ensure high-quality data, I’d suggest either removing these “invalid” country tags or introducing a separate field to capture regional information.
Let me know what you think!

https://openfoodfacts.slack.com/archives/C03H290LF/p1740745757961939?thread_ts=1740007727.605589&channel=C03H290LF&message_ts=1740745757.961939