We reported on the city’s succesful challenge to the Census’ 2005 D.C. population estimate earlier — the city argued that the Census had undercounted in D.C., and the Census Bureau agreed, adding more than 31,000 people to their estimate. That turned a loss of 21,000 people to a gain of 10,000, which would be DC’s first population increase since the 1950s.

But unfortunately for D.C., if a person uses the Census Bureau’s website to see the District’s population, they’ll be getting the wrong information. Any search on their website, such as the Population Finder or QuickFacts on the home page, still shows the old estimate of 550,521 instead of 582,049. Thus, for most people, it will look like D.C. is losing population as usual — apparently down more than 55,000 since 1990. Not great for the city, which is still struggling to repair its image around the country. The new estimate is listed one place on the site, the estimate challenge page, but unless somebody already knew about it, there’d be no way to find it — there is no link or note on any of the pages that show the population which there’s been an update.

We contacted the Census Bureau to find out why the numbers aren’t udpdated, and demographer Greg Harper said the Census Bureau doesn’t update the population tables when there are challenges because there are a lot of tables available a number of different places. The Public Information Office added that the total U.S. population estimate wasn’t also increased 31,000 and “we have not yet determined which places will be decreased to compensate.” Harper said the numbers would be updated when the next estimate comes out around December, meaning the old numbers will have been up about 6 months after the challenge.

As for why the challenge isn’t noted on the Quickfacts page that shows D.C.’s population, the press office said that any asterisk or footnote would have to be added to every page that shows population, which might be confusing to users. They did admit that we had a valid point and that the challenges were “difficult to find.”

There were only 13 accepted challenges this year, including St. Louis and Provo, Utah, though Harper said there can be 30 to 40. St. Louis is in the same boat as DC, their challenge resulted in a population gain instead of a loss. However, Wikipedia’s D.C. page does have the updated population — another reason why Wikipedia is awesome.