Why is population missing from most cities in the World Cities Database?

As noted on the product page, the database only includes population data for some (prominent) cities.  By design, most of the places in the database are populated places.  That is, named places where people live.  Most of these populated places do not have municipal governments and most do not have formal population statistics.  There are a lot more villages in the world than large cities, so population data will always be unavailable for the majority of places.

In addition, our population coverage does vary somewhat by country (e.g. we do have better coverage in the US and Canada than in Africa) as sourcing data is more difficult in developing countries.  This is something we continue to improve over time as we update the database.