Wikipedia:Reliability of GNIS data

Wikipedia has thousands of "populated place" stubs which were mass-created from the United States government's Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database. Unfortunately, a major flaw has been found in this source: GNIS has labeled many locations as "populated places" in error rather than as a locale or another more accurate category. There are countless instances of discrepancies between the GNIS and print versions of the National Gazetteer, a publication of the USGS with the same entries. This means that everything from small homesteads to railroad junctions to river crossings have been mislabeled as "populated places".