CIA ends publication of its popular World Factbook reference tool

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The White House has moved to cut staffing at the CIA and the National Security Agency early in Trump’s second term, forcing the agency to do more with less.

Dammit, I liked using the World Factbook.

I seriously doubt that they’re saving all that much money. They have to gather the data anyway for CIA use; this just meant that the public got to benefit from some of it too.

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I seriously doubt that they’re saving all that much money.

I also bet this is correct - if you look at how they collect the data, they don’t do any first-hand investigation of basic info that is clearly shared or copied from other USG agencies. They’re editors. This probably puts like 4 people, 2 of which I bet are perpetually near retirement, out of editing jobs. And it’s not like they’re saving server or web hosting time when they also host huge amounts of declassified archives.

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they don’t do any first-hand investigation of basic info that is clearly shared or copied from other USG agencies.

Specifically the World Factbook people probably don’t, but I’m sure that least some of the estimates will come from the CIA, because they’re going to be the ones who are going to be responsible for same.

But what I’m saying is that they aren’t going to be closing the analysis guys down, just the public publication of that information. And the analysis part is going to be the bulk of the budget.

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I will stand corrected in that apparently some of the photos were taken by their people. But things like economic data or demographic data come from the State Department. State used to put out all these policy documents and reports which were all original sources of USG data. I’m seeing Archive.org is overloaded to look at the Factbook sources page, but IIRC, they give a lot of credit to other sources.

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https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/ Oh, hey, I saw this a minute ago.

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The thing is that it’s a reference work; a major part of the value is that it’s current. Old versions are going to decline in usefulness.

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Yeah, definitely. Anyone want to buy a stack of old encyclopedias? It’s a shame that so many useful resources are being removed or destroyed.

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*Britannica*’s print edition bit the dust in 2010:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published since 1768, and after several ownership changes is currently owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition.[1] Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com.

Printed for 245 years, the Britannica was the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language.

…but the World Book Encyclopedia is still doing printed editions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Encyclopedia

The World Book Encyclopedia is an American encyclopedia.[1] World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually.[1] Although published online in digital form for a number of years, World Book is currently the only American encyclopedia which also still provides a print edition.[2] The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects.[3]

World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2024, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.[4]

I have to admit that I’ve never bought a print copy of the World Book myself, though I did grow up with one.

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Would’ve been nice to link to his source .zip file so we didn’t have to find it for ourselves. Closest I could find on quick first try was 2020-2021 in EPUB & PDF formats - possibly using scanned pages.

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Not sure if this is what you were looking for but there’s a link at the bottom of the repo to a GitHub pages hosted version of the 2020 version.

https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/

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Any idea if this can be turned into a zim file for kiwix easily?

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It’s already there.

Anna’s Archive has a copy from last summer.

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Can’t be having people fact-check MAGA in real time.

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Something, something.. 1984

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We’ve always never had the factbook!

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That all nice and good, but where’s the rest of the World Fuck Book, eeerm the Epstein Files?

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Crazy that anyone trusts anything from the CIA? I thought most people would not trust them especially nowadays.

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I also always thought it was crazy, but apparently it was highly accurate. Basically a compilation of data gathered by the different US government agencies, in a neatly organized document. Perhaps the only good thing the CIA ever did for the world lol

Looking at the 2020 version’s information for my country, I don’t see anything controversial.

Has little tidbits like:

Cultural Practices: It is considered rude to greet someone while seated, stand up to introduce yourself.

Which is absolutely true, though I don’t imagine it’s unique to Estonia?

Here’s a mirror of the 2020 version, anyway

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You’re greatly overestimating the awareness the general population has of the heinous shit the CIA has pulled.

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Maybe I missed something but why exactly was the World Factbook important now that we have Wikipedia and widespread access to other sources? And do we seriously consider the AmeriKKKan CIA a reliable source on literally anything?

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A lot of Wikipedia articles cite the factbook.

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Which is an indictment of Wikipedia I guess AmeriKKKa AmeriKKKa AmeriKKKa

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