CIA World Factbook Is Gone. One Developer Rebuilt It From Scratch
CIA World Facebook Is Dead – Here Is an Attempt at Recreation
After the CIA World Factbook shut down, a developer recreated it as worldfacts.app, covering 217 countries and territories. Data is pulled from the World Bank, WHO, IMF, FAO, UNODC, and governance indices, with entries for territories and non-sovereign areas alongside sovereign nations.
Country data drawn from World Bank, WHO, IMF, FAO, UNODC, governance indices, etc. Some entries may be territories or non-sovereign areas.
- nomilk
For those who aren't aware, the CIA World Factbook was a bit like a modern day atlas with many well-sourced headline statistics about each and every country. Things like it's political structure, religion, economy, population, history etc.
I missed it recently when wanting to compare government revenue and expenditure for several countries. Without it, I didn't bother as I'd have to look figures up manually through each respective country's own budget website, and ensure figures were like-for-like (which they rarely are), and doing this for each country each with its own conventions is prohibitively tedious. Therein lies the value of Factbook; all that miserable distillation work was done for us.
The rationale for defunding was 'why should the US tax-payer fund something that's equally valuable for everyone in the world'. I think that's fair. But I lament its removal and wish the US could rattle the tin so other countries chip in and bring it back.
- xnx
Title does not match page and title says "Facebook" instead of "Factbook".
- mindcrime
"CIA World Facebook"--> Is that a code name for PRISM or ECHELON or whatever??
- jakzurr
According to the wikipedia article,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
this is the new open source site:
- k310
The most recently archived (meaning last) one seems to be 2020. 367 MB.