Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.
20 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total words in books. Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K total words.
If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.
Over 30 years ago, was working on a presentation software that shipped with a bunch of (vector) clip art and remember using the (raster) graphics from the CIA World Factbook as a base to create vector (WMF) versions of the flags of various ‘new’ countries at the time (following the breakup of Yugoslavia) that were missing from the set that our art vendor provided to us.
The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).
> this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working
Since the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.
The Factbook dates from a time when this was the most convenient source of updated concise summaries of all countries. It didn’t necessarily go into great detail except for countries important to the US national interest.
This has been eclipsed by Wikipedia, the information there is far more comprehensive and govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections.
Where do you think the information on Wikipedia comes from? Not that Wikipedia strongly relies on The World Factbook, but it can't exist without other secondary sources like these.
This is incorrect. Wikipedia relies primarily on secondary sources, which makes it a tertiary source, and it describes itself this way.[1] The World Factbook does not collect the information it provides, making it a secondary source.
Or maybe a conscious decision, as neoconservative Robert Kagan writes:
"President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was and has weakened America's ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive. Wait until they start paying for what comes next,"
Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
Soft power includes positive perception. Every time someone learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American government and then freely available to the rest of the world, that shapes perception.
The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.
You might be underestimating the reach, you've got schoolchildren around the world using it as it's usually the most convenient source you're allowed to cite for this data
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that.
Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.
Under the current administration it wouldn't surprise me if they decided in their last budget cutting meeting to indiscriminately erase everything with the wildcard "fact" in the project's name.
“Soft power” refers usually to credibility. The point of the Factbook is to be a credible public resource for an entity that would otherwise not have much.
You can make propaganda without lying, by choosing what metrics you value over others for example, by adding them or omitting them or implying whether a stat increasing is positive or negative.
Also choosing which methodology is the "right" one to measure a specific number.
There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you just have to be globally consistent
ODNI also did not publish its quadrennial Global Trends report last year, even though it was written. It probably talked too much about the rise of fascism.
This is incredibly frustrating, something so neutrally appreciated and used by everyone dropped. For no reason at all, but it’s not hard to infer why. Can’t have those pesky facts getting in the way of gaslighting the masses.
That's the idea, yes. Kill all primary sources, wound all secondary sources (examples: WaPo or "Grokipedia"), convince everyone that they should use this tertiary source whose full control is in the hands of a very few.
It being a technology that inherently has plausible deniability when it for example starts referring to itself as Mecha-Hitler is a feature, not a bug!
The World Factbook wasn't prone to hallucinations, intentional omissions, the whims of billionaires, or the unstated goals of astroturfing groups.
If the government has somewhere to tell you what it thinks is true, you can use that to double-check another part of the government that's misleading you on that same data. You can also double-check it against other sources of truth to gain insight about potential manipulation in one or more of the systems.
I don’t think this is true, some of the data is not clean and is created through estimates and modeling, I’d not trust ChatGpt to get this right, and adding your own uncited models or estimates to wikipedia will get it deleted.
This is so stupid. Wikipedia needs sources and citations in order to construct articles, and chatgpt needs training data to build it's models. The CIA world fact book sits at the core of training and wikipedia citations. It is the inception point of all these other services you use.
Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.
At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.
"Facebook" :)
Surely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)
I initially read it as Facebook as well and almost celebrated :D
> Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
20 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total words in books. Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K total words.
If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.
Over 30 years ago, was working on a presentation software that shipped with a bunch of (vector) clip art and remember using the (raster) graphics from the CIA World Factbook as a base to create vector (WMF) versions of the flags of various ‘new’ countries at the time (following the breakup of Yugoslavia) that were missing from the set that our art vendor provided to us.
The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).
Bit confused, what's this to do with the CIA World Factbook?
> this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working
Obviously, facts do not play a big role in the current government's world view.
Truly dark times when we can't even trust the CIA anymore.
Since the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.
I have that up and running now for the 2020 edition: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020 - repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/
That was the last year they published it all in one convenient zip file. Serving 2026 requires a longer running scrape of the Internet Archive.
The Factbook dates from a time when this was the most convenient source of updated concise summaries of all countries. It didn’t necessarily go into great detail except for countries important to the US national interest. This has been eclipsed by Wikipedia, the information there is far more comprehensive and govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections.
Where do you think the information on Wikipedia comes from? Not that Wikipedia strongly relies on The World Factbook, but it can't exist without other secondary sources like these.
Wikipedia is actually the secondary source when someone reads a page on it, and it requires primary sources (like factbooks) to cite to exist.
This is incorrect. Wikipedia relies primarily on secondary sources, which makes it a tertiary source, and it describes itself this way.[1] The World Factbook does not collect the information it provides, making it a secondary source.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PSTS
It can be both. It uses Primary and Secondary sources. That is why you check the references and use them appropriately.
The problem is who checks the sources. Of the what billions of sources, how many have actually been verified?
Also, when there are conflicts, who decides what the ‘facts’ are, eh?
is is the Gulf of America or not?
Nobody, you just mention the different points of view that are in the sources.
Most countries have some kind of statistics department that publishes that kind of data in great detail.
The issues start when you try to compare data, because different sources will use different methodologies
And some methodologies use false information.
> govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections
That's one way of putting it.
Can we please, please not outsource everything to Wikipedia? Many of the editors there are hardly impartial
Because the CIA is impartial?
The Factbook dates from a time when facts mattered
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
Discussed a few days ago as well
in a world where "alternative facts" rule, this is just a natural conclusion
Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.
Or maybe a conscious decision, as neoconservative Robert Kagan writes:
"President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was and has weakened America's ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive. Wait until they start paying for what comes next,"
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699388/is-the-u-s-head...
Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
Soft power includes positive perception. Every time someone learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American government and then freely available to the rest of the world, that shapes perception.
The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.
You might be underestimating the reach, you've got schoolchildren around the world using it as it's usually the most convenient source you're allowed to cite for this data
What is this soft power and what can the US do with it?
Shape the world to benefit the US - having US dollar be strong primarily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
I believe Trump has asked that exact question. But also asked how much it costs and whether it can be privatized.
Make the dollar the global currency and reap the benefits of facilitating gentle commerce?
Did you forget the /s?
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that.
Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
I remember this from literally 20 years ago.
Maybe the traffic made it not worth the cost?
And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.
Under the current administration it wouldn't surprise me if they decided in their last budget cutting meeting to indiscriminately erase everything with the wildcard "fact" in the project's name.
Like how they deny visas to fact checkers.
Reminds me of the forbidden word lists that they created at the beginning of the second Trump term: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
I don't know if you jest but thats exactly what they did with many other words. What a timeline.
“Soft power” refers usually to credibility. The point of the Factbook is to be a credible public resource for an entity that would otherwise not have much.
In International Relations, my #1 or #2 hobby, credibility does not refer to soft power. (my number 1 hobby is philosophy)
You can make propaganda without lying, by choosing what metrics you value over others for example, by adding them or omitting them or implying whether a stat increasing is positive or negative.
Also choosing which methodology is the "right" one to measure a specific number.
There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you just have to be globally consistent
Interesting. I read about this. "Concealment and spinning" are two ways to not lie.
One of Trump administration's main goal is to destroy US soft power
ODNI also did not publish its quadrennial Global Trends report last year, even though it was written. It probably talked too much about the rise of fascism.
This is incredibly frustrating, something so neutrally appreciated and used by everyone dropped. For no reason at all, but it’s not hard to infer why. Can’t have those pesky facts getting in the way of gaslighting the masses.
An outdated service that belongs to the era of encyclopedia. Wikipedia moved us past it. ChatGPT has moved us so far past it, it's become a relic.
Isn't it essentially a source for both of those things?
If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time constrained.
That's the idea, yes. Kill all primary sources, wound all secondary sources (examples: WaPo or "Grokipedia"), convince everyone that they should use this tertiary source whose full control is in the hands of a very few.
It being a technology that inherently has plausible deniability when it for example starts referring to itself as Mecha-Hitler is a feature, not a bug!
It aggregates many public sources, so much of it is findable, but not all.
ChatGPT and Wikipedia are not primary sources of information.
The World Factbook wasn't prone to hallucinations, intentional omissions, the whims of billionaires, or the unstated goals of astroturfing groups.
If the government has somewhere to tell you what it thinks is true, you can use that to double-check another part of the government that's misleading you on that same data. You can also double-check it against other sources of truth to gain insight about potential manipulation in one or more of the systems.
Here's one hot take:
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/a-well-informed-electorat...
I don’t think this is true, some of the data is not clean and is created through estimates and modeling, I’d not trust ChatGpt to get this right, and adding your own uncited models or estimates to wikipedia will get it deleted.
LLM’s memory recall is extremely lossy. Facts should not be lossy.
This is so stupid. Wikipedia needs sources and citations in order to construct articles, and chatgpt needs training data to build it's models. The CIA world fact book sits at the core of training and wikipedia citations. It is the inception point of all these other services you use.