GeoNames Forum

I noticed that in cities1000, over 5700 entries are missing admin1codes. I grabbed the http://www.world-gazetteer.com data and cross referenced

city name and country as xref with world-gazetteer data to get admin1 names and xrefed name in admin1codes table to get the new codes and substring to get the code as it exists in geoname table for missing ones. (at least 2300 got resolved)

I am using these I admit I haven't check all but spot checked few and seemed right. File enclosed.

Thanks a lot. Do you have a GeoNames username so that I can associate your user account with the originator of the batch update?

Marc

More than 5000 records in cities1000 are still missing admin1 that is about 45% of the base.

And I've found that world-gazetteer.com has admin1 almost for every location (only 137 locations among 308309 are missing admin1 code and it is 0.05%). http://world-gazetteer.com/dataen.zip

So it makes sense to parse that data to extract cities' admin codes.
It may be difficult due to different name spelling, but some countries in cities1000 have 100% counterpart cities in world-gazetteer.com with the same spelling for main name. For example Romania (90% cities without admin codes), Greece (40%) etc

Also world-gazetteer.com base has local name field for cities (arabic, greek, cyrillic) and this is smart idea. Maybe you consider to add a field with official local name too.
Because currently there is no automatic way to choose proper local display name among several translation variants. Preferred names sometimes missing and sometimes wrongly assigned. Also there are records with several preferred translated names.
At the same time 99.9% cities have only one official local name so it deserves a field in main table.