How does MB know the state where an artist was born

MusicBrainz Development
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I have a web app that calls the MusicBrainz API to get artist information. I’ve noticed the MusicBrainz web site is able to show the birth city, state, and country for some artists. For example, the entry for Elvis Presley shows he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. But the artist lookup API doesn’t seem to return any state info, just city and country. I have the right MBID and I’m specifying these includes on the request: ‘tags’, ‘genres’, ‘artist-rels’, ‘url-rels’, ‘place-rels’, ‘annotation’.

My question is, how does the site know he was born in Mississippi, and how can I get that info for any artist?

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The connection is via the area. We don’t show intermediate subdivisions in API responses because, unlike the country, they are not usually relevant to most people, but you can always do an area query with the area MBID to look for them. Eventually I might finish [WIP] MBS-6741: Include area containment in WS responses by reosarevok · Pull Request #3334 · metabrainz/musicbrainz-server · GitHub and add it as an option but I remember it was not trivial, just not why.

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Sounds good, thanks.