This is the forum for Cities of Your Country.
Post your questions, issues or suggestions about the deck here.
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Hi! I wanted to try this deck, so I started with something I already know : french cities. And the results are a bit strange … Could you explain how you selected the cities?
Here are some strange things :
- Divodurum Mediomatricorum (“Wikidata ID:Q3032422”) is an old name that nobody use for Metz. And there is a note for Metz.
- Signy-le-Petit, oh I remember Signy-le-Petit but I really don’t get why would anyone recall this small town. And it’s not in any urban area or something like that …
- And there are several towns like this, mostly in nord-east, I think.
Hi, yes I can remove cities like Divodurum Mediomatricorum, I can see it has the property “replaced by” which I can use. Will update soon.
But for Signy-le-Petit I don’t see why it shouldn’t be added. The goal of the deck is to add all (existing) cities and towns, also small ones. The deck has sorted the cities by population so those small ones should appear last and you can just stop adding new cards once there are only small towns left.
Could you explain how you selected the cities?
The cities are all selected as instance of or subclass of “city or town” and “urban area”. E.g. “city” is a subclass of “city of town”. There are some which are not added such as cities that are historic, dissolved, etc.
Do you know if there are any cities/towns missing from France? I know that France has 35.000 communes, but a commune is an administrative subdivision, not a human settlement.
Ok! Now I understand the problem. It’s not about Signy-le-Petit, it’s about many cities missing from France!
In fact, the Ardennes subdivision is very strange … The biggest city is “Charleville-Mezières” but I can’t find it… This “département” is not one of the most populous but there is 34 notes inside this tag “tag:cities::Ardennes”…
I’m a bit confused about this administrative stuff… So France has something like 35000 communes, ok. I think it’s too much for this deck ? I don’t think there is a good distinction between “town” and “city” in France, but for the INSEE (statistics bureau) a “ville” (more or less a city or a town) has more than 2000 inhabitants. In this document, they say that 90% of the communes have less than 3000 inhabitants. So with this definition we should have about 3500 cities or towns …
Well, I need to look further how it works with countries like Germany or Spain… Maybe the tags “arrondissement-of-…” and “canton-of-…” are useless because it’s very “administrative” and nobody uses it except for legal or political stuff. It’s because I imagine this deck as a practical tool in these situations:
- someone tells me “I’m from Signy-le-Petit”
- I’m walking somewhere in Charleville-Mezières and I saw a sign about “Sedan” (I think that Signy-le-Petit is too small for this, sorry)
- I read some text about “the depressing village of Signy-le-Petit”
Alright I see,
I have added the communes with a population greater than 3000, there are 3724 of them. You can update your deck 24 hours from now.
The cards will appear last in the deck unless you reposition them.
Great! I have a very limited network so I won’t be able to redownload the deck right now but thank you!
Hi! Sounds like a great deck, I just downloaded it.
But for me some of the cards don’t show images for some reason… Both on desktop and mobile.
Even though the maps are present in edit mode:
Again, it’s only certain cards it seems, I’ve gone through something like 12 of them and only 2 or 3 had this issue.
I have no idea what’s happening…
Thanks, it was when a ' character appeared in the file name. I updated the deck, you can download it in 24 hours.
Hi!
I didn’t download the latest version but some cities seems to lack a good zoom view. For example: Alicante (Q11959) has 3 maps: Spain, the Comunidad Valenciana and Alicante Province. Perfect. But in France, “Chinon” (Q194138) or “Bobigny” (Q154724) only have 1 and 2 maps. It would be very useful to be able to go to the “département” level…
Which led me to another question. How do you get the maps and the % values to position the marker? I would like to add some cities because in areas with low population, some of them aren’t big enough to be part of the deck but they have a relative importance (like in Lozère (tag:cities::Lozère), I think of Florac (2000 inhabitants) … So I think I can get what I want from Wikidata except for the maps and the position of the marker, could you tell me how to do this?
It is quite limited which maps are available. Here is a list of the pushpin maps Template:Location map/List - Wikipedia. “Chinon” should have a second map of " Centre-Val de Loire", which does not appear on the list. Apparently this template doesn’t exist on the English Wikipedia, but is available on the French: Modèle:Géolocalisation/Centre-Val de Loire — Wikipédia. With the way MediaWiki’s API works, it is not possible for me to take other Wikipedias into consideration, instead the pages could be added to the English Wikipedia as well.
But I don’t think there exist maps for all the département levels.
The way maps are added is by searching Wikidata map data modules (Q18711811) which depict (P180) something. If that something is one of the tags, that map is used. On the Wikipedia page it says its boundaries, e.g. Module:Location map/data/France - Wikipedia. You can compute the position with some simple code like getX and getY from here Module:Location map - Wikipedia.
Do you think what you did is also possible with something like Openstreetmaps? The cards look very detailed there. And you might learn also villages, rivers and streets.
Maybe there is a way to connect over api and do some cloze deletion?
One reason because I am asking is that if I want to learn cities of a region they are still so close together on the second map. So it would be better to zoom in more. Also would be interesting then to enrich the cards with names and so on.
The problem with OSM is it contains labels for the city names, so it would give you the answer when trying to guess.
It might be possible to remove them, but I haven’t been able to figure out a way.
I chose the wiki maps as they can be downloaded and make for fast reviews since they are simple.
However, if you want me to send a version with latitude and longitude included in the notes that you can to experiment on, I can do that.
Unfortunately not enough time. It was just an idea 
Ankidroid v2.17 has now User actions. We can use it in order to change the map to the next one or the previous one. All we need is to add a Javascript line in the templates just before the last </script> tag. Example:
In Card 1:
var userJs1 = next_map;
var userJs2 = prev_map;
Then, in Ankidroid set a key, gesture or else in Parameters → Controls → User action 1.
Hello,
This is a great deck, congratulations!
However, I’m having trouble filtering for my country. How do I do this step by step? I am an Android app user.
Thank you very much in advance!
The add-on page has examples of how to filter. Can you say more about what you’re having trouble with in those directions?
They are all based on Anki’s regular search syntax (Searching - Anki Manual), which will work on AnkiDroid just as well.
Hi , thank you for the answer. I can’t understand where to place the filters. I mean I download the deck and then what? Where do we place the filters?
Thank you in advance!
Hello,
The manual should answer your questions:
https://docs.ankidroid.org/#browser
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Hello, I would like to know how you can add cities to the deck. I have another file for which I have all cities with recorded populations over any given value. Many of these cities are not in the file. I was wondering how I could converge these to have the same list. I have the data compiled that includes:
Name, country, population, and coordinates.
Hello,
Creating cards is a little complicated, but since I already have a Wikidata bot and some scripts for Wikipedia with the maps, I might be able to add them if you send the list
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