How to ensure uniform categories/selections in ratings site/app

Hope everyone is doing well and staying safe.

I am a non-technical founder working on a recommendations style site/app. Whilst not specifically trained in design I am currently doing the UI/UX design and overall planning/road map for it and figuring out user flow with some static mockups. Essentially users will be able to share their 'Top 3' across a variety of categories from music to movies, food and everything in between. They will also be able to share specific single products/services they are using which they love.

My question pertains to the selection of categories/products/services when choosing to post/share something. I.e. how can I ensure that people are using a uniform system whereby they are all posting the correct product/service rather than having people using a variation of names, spellings etc

My initial thought was just to update our product/service database manually with a moderator or community manager constantly adding new products/services. Could this be automated in any way? Could I have some kind of data scraping or parsing that could update the database?

Alternatively, could it be crowdsourced - i.e. similar to Quora and many other sites, whereby when you select a category/topic, you start typing and a dropdown menu appears, which details the relevant categories and their respective follower base, which essentially shepherds people into the correct and correctly spelt categories.

Hopefully, I've been able to articulate my question/problem well enough and would appreciate any help you can provide. Thanks in advance! :)