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I'm making use of the UN demographic yearbook which has a table listing most of the world's cities with populations over 100,000 (along with their populations). However, some major places are missing, such as China and both Congos. An answer to a similar question here provides a tsv file but GeoNames' population data is not too accurate (lots of outdated data and the specific sources used for each country are unknown).

Does anyone know of a list that does indeed have all of the world's cities with populations over 100,000 that also lists their population? Preferably as accurate as possible, i.e. using national census data, and relying on estimates only when necessary (and stating their source for each data point).

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3 Answers 3

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Similar to @Harsh's answer, here is a Wikidata SPARQL query that gives the top

Link to Wikidata query tool

Direct link to result

SELECT DISTINCT ?city ?cityLabel ?population
WHERE 
{
    ?city wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q515 .  # find instances of subclasses of city

    # Now select the population value of the ?city
    # (wdt: properties use only statements of "preferred" rank if any, usually meaning "current population")
    ?city wdt:P1082 ?population .

    # filter for cities with more than 100k
    FILTER (?population > 100000) .
    # Optionally, find English labels for city:
    SERVICE wikibase:label {
        bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" .
    }
}
ORDER BY DESC(?population)

enter image description here

(adapated from here)

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  • This is great, but actually I'm on a mission of sorts to update the Wikipedia List of Cities with 100,000+ Inhabitants so I'm a bit wary of using Wikipedia data for that... Is this data very accurate / using official figures? Nov 18, 2016 at 0:12
  • You should update your question with this info
    – philshem
    Nov 18, 2016 at 6:24
  • ? The question asks for as accurate of a source as possible already, what else would I add to the question? Nov 18, 2016 at 18:41
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Wikipedia has a list which might be help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_cities#List . You can also use wikidata(http://wikidata.org/) to query all items on wikipedia marked as cities and then their get their populations in machine readable form.

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Many small cities have merged over the years.Hence sometimes it is difficult to assign definitive values to city populations, e.g. when cites have become agglomerations - megacities. For a major fraction of the world population, this matters.

The website https://citypopulation.de/ has this data. All urban agglomerations of the world with at least 1 million inhabitants.

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