GeoNames Forum

I have allCountries.txt imported into mysql and want to do some analysis on population sums on certain regions.

Firstly, I tried to figure out "world population" by performing:
select sum(population)
from allCountries_table

Yet this result is extremely off from the realistic result.

I then tried to find sum of population per country doing:

select country_code, sum(population)
from allCountries_table
group by country_code

and yet, these numbers are far off from http://www.geonames.org/countries/

What fields in the query am I missing so that my results can match the populations listed on the link above?