Canada Cities Grid Identifier Challenge
DirectionsThe object of this quiz is to double-click the grid square where cities are located (the centroid of the city is used). When you begin you will have a grid randomly placed with size 5 degrees latitude by 5 degrees longitude. You will be told which city to locate – simply double-click on that city’s grid square and you will move on to the next city. Each time you go to a new city the squares are randomly redrawn and with a size 10% smaller. The first 10 cities will be 250K+, the next 10 100-250K, next 10 50-100K and the balance (until you run out of time or guess wrong) will be 25-50K. When you guess wrong the correct location will be shown as a pink marker.
You do get a break if you are within 2 km of the city but in the wrong square – you will not get credit for the guess but will get another chance at that level.
After the quiz is over you can click RESTART to retry it without refreshing the page.
Quiz Takers 
The 2km margin is a good idea, but I wonder if it should be proportional to the geographic extent of the city by lat/long (or something) rather than a fixed number. For example, if you click in Edmonton on the densest area (downtown) that seems to be sort of visually in the “center”, it’s more than 2km from the current coordinates which are to the southwest.
I know (as a geographer/cartographer in a past life) that the area centroid is used as the “center” for many technical purposes, but normal humans will generally take the center of a city to be near either its center of population or visually-estimated mean lat/long. Any irregular shape tends to have a centroid that is not a meaningful “center point” of a city to a human, despite its usefulness for math.
This could also be addressed, as others have suggested, by allowing a click anywhere within the city. Or! Changing the grid determination algorithm to avoid intersecting a grid boundary with a boundary of the target city.
Let me know a list of cities like this and I will manually make the coordinates the ‘population center’ area of the city.
Along with the city center issues, there’s a similar problem with “lower-tier municipalities” in Canadian parlance. For example Clarington is included in the 100-250k block, with a geographic center in the middle of a rural area. The quiz says it is a “cities” quiz, and “lower-tier municipalities” are only “cities” in a legal sense so they share an administrative structure for efficiency — they aren’t cities by the definition of any demographic/geographic/scientific entity. Bownmanville, within the Clarington municipality, is technically an unincorporated community since the creation of Clarington, but it is the only significant population center (urban place or “city”) in Clarington with over 80% of the population, and the seat of the municipality’s administration. Because of Clarington’s weird lopsided shape in order to include one small town to the north, its geographic center is not in any urban place at all, and I lost out when placing its center at Bowmanville.
In short: geographic center makes sense for Canadian single-tier municipalities, i.e. “cities” in the normal sense. But “lower-tier municipalities” are agglomerations that are purely an administrative quirk to provide a shared resource for small settlements that is more local than a county, they generally only have one significant population center (“city”), and it would make sense — if they’re going to be included at all — for their coordinates to be at either the population-weighted center or at the technically unincorporated but actual “city” in the municipality.
I realize that could get complex and then you have an “inconsistent” center rule, and I wouldn’t honestly expect the effort to be worth it. But I needed to say it because it is a legitimate weirdness of Canada’s “lower-tier municipality” thing.
Mirabel is another example. It’s an artificial municipality that was created to be a transit and industrial hub, but that never happened. Its coordinates here are in the middle of a rural area south of the airport (which is closed to commercial passenger traffic and essentially a zombie), nowhere near any of the actual settlements which are along its outer edges away from the airport.
The municipality of Mirabel is co-geographic with the “county” of Mirabel, in fact, making it even clearer that it’s only a legal/administrative “city” and not a city per se.
Shouldn’t the single-tier municipalities in Ontario allow you to click anywhere within their borders instead of just the center? Because I got robbed at 21 cities by clicking on Lindsay in Kawartha Lakes instead of the dead center.
I also just lost the same way to Ottawa.
I lost similarly, that’s why I believe the point that should be used is the centre of the city, such as is used to measure distances for transportation by provinces and the federal government. For example, why is Sept Îles in the wilderness, or why is Alma QC in the middle of water?
I’ll try to fix the coordinates on these so they are in city centers.
let me know any other cities with this issue – i’ve fixed the ones mentioned in this thread so far.