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Since the subject of gnome-maps is current right now ...

When I installed Fedora 21, I was mildly piqued that I couldn't choose Montreal, home for me.

According to the online Fedora Documentation, section 5.4.3 (1), "The list of cities and regions comes from the Time Zone Database (tzdata) public domain, which is maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The Fedora Project can not add cities or regions into this database."

Ok, grumble grumble, I used to be able to choose Montreal in Anaconda. I chose New York, about 595km away; I could have chosen Toronto at about 542km away.

After install gnome-maps today, I opened it and it immediately displayed a map of New York City, presumably since gnome-maps looked up my city location, which I entered in Anaconda,

You don't enter your city in Anaconda, it's the timezone.

found New York, and displayed a pin over New York City.

And gnome-maps doesn't read it, it uses geoip to the Mozilla servers: https://location.services.mozilla.com/

I'm pretty sure that the timezone is used as a fallback.

I assume that /usr/share/zoneinfo/ is populated from the Time Zone Database; the files for the various regions are a little bit text and apparently a good amount of binary. Is there a way for the common user to populate this directory with custom entries?

Grab the tzdata source, and have fun.

But, FWIW, this is useless work. Copying America/NewYork to America/Montreal will have a similar effect (adds an entry which won't be accepted upstream).

More generally, is there a way to specify a closer city in the settings so that a user gets a ballpark useful starting location if their hometown or metropolitan area isn't in the list mentioned above?

Anaconda could use libgweather which contains this information, but it does not.