Airline Club

Hi bluesky, as mentioned in the other thread I'm willing to assist here by adding cities.

Before I start doing big work, I wondered on whether we should maybe define on what definitions and from what sources we add city populations? I see two possible definitions, both with advantages and disadvantages: Populations of municipalities (administrative divisions) or population of urban areas.

Municipalities
+ clearly defined borders
+ clear numbers from censuses
- fragmentation varies greatly between countries (e.g. Europe: An urban area consists often of many municipalities, only a minority lives in the core city (in game: Paris!), e.g. on the other hand Chongquing in China, which covers a huge area with a lot of rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing )

Urban Areas
+ Should ensure that cities are more comparable globaly in game
+ there are fewer, less work
- sometimes unclear definition, numbers
- could encircle several clearly independent cities (e.g. Tokyo & Yokohama)

As you mentioned server performance as an issue, the advantage of urban areas would be, that fewer cities/data points would have to be made.

Then, what source should be used? I found just yesterday this one: http://www.citypopulation.de/ I did not know it before, but it looks professional, with data from all countries, whenever possible from official censuses. It also makes the above mentioned distinctions, depending on the country you can find population numbers on municipalities, districts, urban agglomerations, etc. What do you think?