You are right this was missing. There is now a link 'gps' in parenthesis below the overview map. Click on it and a new form will open that lets you enter latitude and longitude. Then you click on the link 'next' below the form and enter the name and featureclass/featurecode of the place.
This is a major batch update in progress. The data is from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, an official source and quite reliable. Nearly all our data for the US is from the same source and we are now updating to the newest release.
If you have the gps coordinates you can enter them on the search form in the format 'latitude,longitude' and press the 'show on map' button : http://www.geonames.org/
Then you zoom in and press the 'insert' button on the left hand side below the overview map. There is a short manual to help with inserting :
http://www.geonames.org/manual.html
There was a problem in the dump script. Thanks for the error report.
I have fixed the problem and I have implemented a check for an empty modifications file. From now on I will get an email if it is empty and I should thus be the first to notice any problems.
Did you also look at the very recent contribution of Rune Aasgaard : http://georss.geonames.org/ His implementation is more sophisticated, though not yet fully implemented. Parsing polygons and lines should already work. It does not make sense to develop two different versions at the same time. I would like to go with his implementation and drop the other release.
The "find nearest address" service only supports US addresses for lack of freely available data everywhere else on the planet. As long as we don't have access to the data required to run a service like this one I don't see any possibility of offering a free service for it.
Buffalo was updated by an anonymous user. I have changed it back and I have also found and corrected three other places with the same incorrect update. Two out of three were updated by an anonymous with IP-Address 24.205.148.225 and 24.205.161.64 (Charter Communications).
I will block updates by the anonymous users for all US records. The data quality of gnis is good enough and anonymous users are probably not increasing it.
For Staten Island I find this record in the newest gnis data set :
942078 Staten Island Island NY 36 Richmond 085 403500N 0740859W 40.5834379 -74.1495875 49 Arthur Kill
I don't believe you will find a free resource with better data. If we knew of one we would have integrated it into geonames.
I had a look at the population data for Switzerland on fallingrain. It seems to be kind of a random number. Most numbers are wrong by
a factor of ten.