There is no coordinates in the french official database. It was all geolocate manually on Wikipedia (but we have some tools to help ; plus it's probably easier in French since the municipalities are small). We decided not to put « approximate » coordinates because it's not possible to distinguish after if the coordinate are approximate or not…
Cdlt, ~nicolas
My suggestion for Russia was to geolocate manually (and I was ready to help), but the organizers did not want to listen.
Cheers Yaroslav