Methodology
cityverdict.info uses an evidence hierarchy so readers can distinguish what comes directly from a source, what is calculated, what is a cautious planning implication and what still requires a current local check.
1. Core city source
Core city data is sourced from Simplemaps World Cities. The fields used by this plugin are city name, ASCII name, latitude, longitude, country, ISO codes, administrative region, capital status, population and city ID. The configured population threshold controls which city pages are eligible for publication.
2. Population definition and rankings
The source population field is treated as an urban-population estimate where available, with municipal population used as a fallback when an urban estimate is unavailable. Population is used for city-scale bands and within-source comparisons only. Country rank counts qualifying same-country rows with a larger source population; regional rank applies the same rule inside the recorded administrative region. These are guide comparisons, not official government city-proper rankings.
3. No additive population totals
The plugin does not add city population rows together to estimate a country, region or metro total. City rows may use different urban or municipal boundaries and can represent overlapping urban geography, so summed totals and city-share percentages would create false precision.
4. Nearby-city geography
Coordinate-to-coordinate distances use the Haversine great-circle formula. The guide tracks nearby city rows at multiple radii and separately identifies larger-population, 500,000-plus and 1-million-plus alternatives. These are geographic distances only; they are not road, rail, ferry, flight or travel-time measurements.
5. Astronomical daylight
Approximate longest- and shortest-day lengths are calculated from latitude and solar declination at the solstices. This is an astronomical day-length estimate only. It does not model cloud, rainfall, temperature, terrain obstruction, civil twilight or local clock time.
6. Capital and cross-border context
Capital status is shown as a source field rather than an automatic advantage. Cross-border context is based on different ISO country codes inside the same straight-line radius and does not imply an open border, easy visa access or convenient transport.
7. Evidence hierarchy on city pages
Directional claims are ranked by source strength before publication. Explicit citywide claims from official, institutional, operator or other primary local sources take priority; NASA POWER and USGS provide scientific regional context; OurAirports provides scheduled-airport evidence; Overture Places provides high-coverage structured place-presence evidence from bounded city extracts; structured Wikidata is treated as supporting local-place evidence rather than equivalent to an official city source. Neutral city fields such as population rank or capital status remain reference context and do not become pros or cons by themselves.
8. Reader-specific lenses
The same structural evidence is interpreted differently for visiting, living, moving, families, students, expats, retirees and young professionals. Very large-city scale may matter to a visitor planning a selective itinerary, while a family or retiree page is deliberately more cautious about treating size itself as a benefit.
9. Climate evidence
When available, long-term climate context comes from NASA POWER rather than a latitude-based temperature model. cityverdict.info requests a fixed 2001–2020 monthly climatology and uses monthly mean temperature, T2M_MAX_AVG and T2M_MIN_AVG for the average daily high and low, corrected precipitation, relative humidity and 10-metre wind. NASA POWER meteorology is gridded MERRA-2 data rather than a street-level station reading or future forecast, so exact travel dates still require local climate normals and a current forecast.
10. Airport evidence
When the optional OurAirports dataset is installed, the guide calculates straight-line distance to scheduled-service airports and can distinguish large, medium and small airport records. This supports arrival-planning context only; it does not infer route frequency, ticket price, reliability or ground-transfer quality.
11. Bulk reference datasets
When installed, GeoNames is matched conservatively to the Simplemaps city table using country, normalized names, coordinates and administrative context; ambiguous matches are withheld. GeoNames reference fields do not silently replace the base population field. GHSL General Characteristics is stored source-separated and conservatively crosswalked to Simplemaps using country, names and coordinates. Stable matched fields such as harmonised urban-centre area or elevation are exposed only when the installed CSV actually contains them; ambiguous matches are withheld.
12. Overture Places city extracts
When the optional Overture Places extractor is installed, cityverdict.info uses the official monthly Overture release catalog and a local DuckDB worker to query only a bounded area around a city. It stores category counts and a few nearby examples rather than mirroring the global Places dataset. Only positive documented presence is used; missing or sparse Overture coverage is never converted into a negative city claim. The engine uses the current basic_category and taxonomy fields and a confidence floor, and excludes records marked permanently closed.
13. Regional seismic context
When the background evidence builder is enabled, cityverdict.info can query the USGS Earthquake Catalog for a count of magnitude 5.5-plus earthquakes within 250 km over a rolling 20-year window. This is used only as a regional preparedness signal. It is not a site-specific hazard score, building-safety assessment or prediction of future earthquakes.
14. No universal quality-of-life score
The sources do not provide a defensible universal score for cost, safety, jobs, healthcare, transport or attractions. cityverdict.info therefore does not collapse unrelated proxies into a 0–100 city rating.
15. Current and neighbourhood-level verification
Time-sensitive and local decisions should be checked with current official, operator, institutional or reputable local sources. The guides direct readers to verify accommodation or rent, real journey times, safety information, observed weather, healthcare, schools, jobs and entry or residency rules where those factors matter.
16. Place-adaptive structure and anti-repetition
Each city receives a structural fingerprint from combinations of city scale, national and administrative-region population position, capital role, nearby peer and larger-city relationships, substantial-city clustering, regional isolation, capital distance and international-city proximity. Sparse comparison sets are handled cautiously so a city is not called nationally dominant merely for ranking first among only two or three qualifying rows. Each analytical signal has one main narrative home and near-duplicate cards are filtered inside a page.
17. Automatic Wikimedia/Wikidata local research
cityverdict.info can automatically discover nearby article-linked entities through the Wikipedia geosearch API and then read structured Wikidata claims. Wikipedia prose is not copied. The automatic layer may surface documented heritage designations, museums or visitor attractions, parks, universities, libraries, rail/metro stations, beaches, ski resorts, theatres, stadiums, castles, hospitals as context, official city links and city-item elevation. Because Wikimedia coverage varies, positive presence may support a cautious claim but missing coverage is never converted into a negative claim. Results are cached per city and refreshed conservatively.
18. Optional editor-sourced local enrichment
An optional citylens-enrichment.json file can add destination-specific notes when each card includes an HTTP(S) source URL. Cards may also carry a source type, category, decision dimension, source publication date, editor-check date and expiry date. Source type is explicitly supplied by the editor rather than guessed from the URL. Expired cards are automatically withheld. Lens-specific summaries and cards are supported. A card may also declare polarity as pro, con or neutral and a claim scope of citywide, district, regional, national or context. Only explicitly polarised cards with scope: citywide can enter the citywide pros/cons; narrower or broader facts remain context instead of being generalized.
19. Limits of structural inference
The base file cannot reliably establish that a place is a beach resort, heritage destination, university town, ski base, nightlife centre, business hub or similar local type. The generator does not guess those identities from names, coordinates or population. Those claims belong in the sourced local-data layer.
20. Public access with evidence-gated indexing
Every eligible city and supported reader lens remains publicly accessible, but search indexing is deliberately more selective. A city/lens page enters the XML sitemap and uses index,follow only after it has balanced pros and cons, multiple city-specific sourced claims, more than one source family, several decision dimensions and evidence relevant to that particular reader lens. Population rank and generic planning cautions cannot unlock indexing by themselves. Pages below the threshold stay noindex,follow while background research continues; when the evidence improves, the robots directive and sitemap eligibility update automatically.
21. Corrections
If a source field appears outdated or incorrect, use the Contact page to report it so the underlying data or logic can be reviewed. Data-led consistency is not a substitute for correcting a bad source row.