r/GlobalTalk • u/usernametakenbutwait • Jul 30 '21
[Global][Meta] Results for the contest to see who can name the largest city no one else will name! Global
Hello everyone, I am back with the results of the contest that was held to see who can name the largest city no one else will name. I would like to thank everyone who participated, as a I received a total of 220 valid responses.
So, before I name the winner, let me begin with a few stats I gathered from the survey.
- Out of the 220 cities I received, 102 of them were unique responses that no one else named.
- The most frequently occurring city was by far the city of Kinshasa, which accounted for 14 of the 220 responses. The 2nd most commonly named cities were Lagos and Dhaka, tied at 5 times each.
- Oddly, I felt like some people took this as a challenge to name the smallest city no one's heard of because I received 6 responses for cities with under 100K people and the smallest "city" mentioned was Bolivar, West Virginia, USA with only about 2,000 people.
Alright, now for the "Medal Ceremony".
🥉 In 3rd place, is u/LilRushin , who was the only one to name Buenos Aires , a city of approx. 15,594,000 people.
🥈 In 2nd place, is u/Zeitstrudel , who was the only one to name Cairo, a city of approx. 19,787,000 people
And for the winner....
🥇 in 1st place, is u/lunatictus , who was the only one to name Seoul, a city of approx. 22,394,000 people.
Link to excel sheet of responses. For determining the population of various cities, I used multiple different sources, including, but not limited to:
- The city's wikipedia page.
- This amazing document I found
- A population estimator tool from NASA
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u/Maybe-Jessica Jul 30 '21 edited Jul 30 '21
I committed to Shanghai, 26 million people (Wikipedia).
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalTalk/comments/orv1jo/z/h6lje7h where the commit value is: echo -n Shanghai r/globaltalk largest unnamed city | md5sum --> 7375a40fa4451a2ac4cb8936f997d42a (this value matches the one from the previous post, and the previous post was last edited 4 days ago, well before the solution was posted above).
So... the person that submitted Shanghai through the form was disqualified, the spreadsheet says. Does that mean I was the only reddit user to name a city of 26 million people?
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u/usernametakenbutwait Jul 30 '21
Almost. I thought about your comment that day but wasn't sure to go ahead with it because I didn't know how I'd extract your answer in time. However, if you had contributed to the Google form your answer would most likely have been disqualified because I checked which cities were repeated before checking if the winner's username is valid, and I would have had two entries for Shanghai. Of course, this is a fault on my part because I should know if someone's username is valid beforehand, but unfortunately that'd take a long time and I'm not smart enough to automate the process either. Moreover, it didn't cross my mind why someone would make a up a username, because you risk not getting the credit you deserve for winning (unless someone knew your answer was shanghai ....tin foil hat time). Most likely the one who chose Shanghai just made a typo which is unfortunate.
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u/Maybe-Jessica Jul 30 '21
your answer would most likely have been disqualified because I checked which cities were repeated before checking if the winner's username is valid, and I would have had two entries for Shanghai
So I lost, darnit! :D
But yeah makes a lot of sense, I'm clearly not the only person to mention Shanghai. Was a fun game anyway :)
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u/altbekannt Jul 30 '21
I find it more impressive to never have heard of Cairo than Seoul, since it's such an important city for western history. It's the city where the pyramids are at,...
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u/Dummie1138 Hong Kong/UK Jul 30 '21
I think most of us just thought someone rlse would have used it.
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u/Flonkadonk Jul 30 '21
Think its less about not knowing that Cairo exists, and not knowing how absolutely massive it is
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u/Tinie_Snipah Aotearoa Jul 31 '21
Could only name one so why name Cairo lol, loads of people have heard of that you would assume that someone said it
I said Foshan because it's a pretty big city but almost unheard of outside of China because it's completely dwarfed by Quangzhou (much like Giza with Cairo)
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u/MeepleTugger Jul 31 '21
That's what's so interesting about this game, the second-guessing. I'd almost expect the very largest city (whatever that may be) to win, under the theory that nobody's gonna pick something that obvious.
You could basically play this game with some friends and a deck of cards. A trick-taking game, like bridge, but highest untied card wins the trick.
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u/bogdanvonpylon Jul 31 '21
I'm kinda unclear on why my answer of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (although obviously not the winner) didn't make the spreadsheet... it's at least notable for being an 11-letter word with 8 vowels. I'll take my answer off the air.
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u/Xicsukin Jul 30 '21
How is Bolivar considered a city?
To my knowledge the title of "city" is based on the amount of people living their (at least 1million+). Where I live has 2,300 residents and is only classed as a small village.
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u/usernametakenbutwait Jul 30 '21 edited Jul 30 '21
Good question, but the answer is that city is actually an arbitrary definition. Different countries define cities differently and it becomes very arbitrary to draw a definite line between a city and a town or a village. For example, would it make sense if a place with 1,001,000 people is a city whereas a place with 999,000 people is a town? So, instead, I let all places participate, as long as it's a human settlement, but of course, a "city" with 2,000 people would never win such a contest, when there are thousands of cities bigger.
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u/hajamieli Finland Jul 30 '21
At least in Finland, a city is just any municipality that chooses to call themselves a city. There'd be no cities in Finland and perhaps most other countries either, by your definition. Yet there definitely are in practice cities in Finland by anyone's observation.
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u/ThatChrisFella Australia Jul 30 '21
In Australia, cities "have a population of at least 25,000 persons and be an independent centre of population; not being a suburb, whether residential, industrial, commercial or maritime, of any other council area or centre of population."
And then major cities have at least 100,000.
So I think it's probably usually defined by what's considered a large population in a given country
Not sure how it works with Bolivar though. Maybe the US defines them differently
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u/ReflexNL Jul 30 '21
My country (the Netherlands) doesn't have a single city with over a million citizens. Here, cities are defined by owning "city rights" that were handed out centuries ago to then-important places. Therefore you can have quite small cities here (<30k citizens) but towns with well over 100k citizens.
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u/Tinie_Snipah Aotearoa Jul 31 '21
In the UK (i know not relevant) cities just have to have a cathedral, so St David's in Wales is a city but has only 1,600 residents
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u/Maybe-Jessica Aug 01 '21
the title of "city" is based on the amount of people living their (at least 1million+).
In Germany, it's a Großstadt (bigcity) as of something on the order of 100k people. A regular city can be much smaller, it's based on whether it was granted certain rights in the past. I think the word you're thinking of is metropolis.
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u/hajamieli Finland Jul 30 '21
How many actually took apart of that thing that needed identifying registration?
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u/a_bright_knight Serbia Jul 30 '21
Seoul 22m? Are you sure thats correct? Thats like 40% of South Korea...
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u/godisanelectricolive Jul 30 '21
That's the Seoul Capital Area which covers 11,704 km2 (4,519 sq mi) and include the city of Incheon. Seoul proper is 9.7 million which is still huge and Incheon is another 3m.
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u/pydry Jul 30 '21
lol i really thought nobody else would name kinshasa.