This is a hybrid of a public dataset and a lot of manual polishing to get rid of duplicates (no doubt there are a still quite a few of those, especially in Asia).

I don't actively maintain the dataset, but if you want I can create a small website around it so people can update it.

The reason I built this was a project called 'autotagger', the idea behind it is to identify people, places and subjects in texts automatically.

It's one of my pet projects but I don't have enough funds to continue to work on it full time without a way to monetize it, so it's been sitting there rusting for the last year or so.

I think I have most of the datastructures and algorithms worked out, it needs a massive rewrite to get it production ready and fast enough.

The fields most subject to change are the population and the names, cities/towns don't get created too often but merging smaller towns does happen.

They rarely move around, so I figure the longitude/latitude should be good for a while ;)