Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell

Urgh, this is nasty:

  curl -i 'https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook'
  HTTP/2 302 
  content-length: 0
  location: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/

They didn't even have the decency to give it a 410 or 404 error.

Same for all of the country pages - they redirect back to the same story: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/morocco/

The thing was released into the public domain! No reason at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.

> Finally, only CIA insiders would know that officers donated some of their personal travel photos to The World Factbook, which hosted more than 5,000 photographs that were copyright-free for anyone to access and use.

Isn’t this sufficient to keep it around, even if the facts themselves may be available on Wikipedia?

Thank you Internet Archive - https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...

Waaaht? And, why? Budgets? This is/was a wonderful resource. I'll be sad to see the back of it.

I remember doing research in the print version of the World Factbook back in college days. It was the most accurate and up-to-date info we could get on countries before the Interwebs. RIP.

why in the world is this being sunset i wonder

Hmmm. They do not mention Wikipedia, but the CIA book kind of had information about countries for a very long time. I get that Wikipedia would objectively make more sense; so while it may make sense to stop investing resources into the CIA book, I still think it would be better to keep tabs on the content of Wikipedia. Kind of like a secondary quality control. It may not be hugely important here, but if 100.000 other websites vanish, I still think it may be an indirect problem for Wikipedia, as all its presented facts may become increasingly more and more circular to itself - which is made worse by AI slop spamming down the global quality.

Ah, was just finishing a geography quiz game with this as one of the fact sources. Oh well!

At least they let the people behind it give a farewell message.

Most cuts to government are abrupt and unceremonious.

What is now a good source of aggregated population statistics?

I don't know that the Schlesinger memo was real but I think it's conclusions were perfect. The CIA needs to be split into two divisions. The research division and the operations division.