Posted by mxfh 2 days ago
I later leaned on the Web version of the factbook quite a bit for basic country stats in undergrad.
I don’t know of a replacement of comparable quality. Damn good resource. Not that you can necessarily trust a government source, and especially one from an intelligence agency, but most of what it covered wasn’t exactly useful for the kind of propaganda you’d expect the US government to push, so you could expect it to broadly be a sincere attempt at describing reality (it didn’t hurt that it wasn’t a super-widely-known resource outside certain academic disciplines, so lying about e.g. the major exports of Guyana or whatever wouldn’t have much effect anyway, lowering the likelihood that anyone would bother)
How many people out there still believe the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all the politically damaging material on it was Russian misinformation?
Remember "lock her up?" Remember how that vanished as well and there was not, in fact, any effort to lock her up?
(the problem of submarining stuff into Wikipedia is real though, and a by-product of it being the most trusted reference)
No accountability in the language
No rationale
No fucks given
What was the point of this post?
/s
And, as multiple commenters here have noted, it's on the Internet Archive. So let's just cherish it as another print tradition that would inevitably end.
It's also where a lot of the facts on Wikipedia came from. This is a real loss.
I trust CIA over official population numbers from a lot of countries. There was a thread on here recently that pointed out a lot of countries haven't conducted an effective census in many years, if at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46810027
Wikipedia has other sources for most of that information. It comes from organizations like the UN, which the administration detests, and now lacks its own way of gathering that information.
A lot of stuff in Wikipedia doesn't have great references, but for the types of stats and facts in the World Factbook, it's generally quite excellent.
Reading books is still important. That has nothing to do with the CIA factbook website edition.
Archiving copies of internet-published information is important, especially when a regime lies, tries to rewrite history, and destroys knowledge and public resources regularly.
> So let's just cherish it as another print tradition that would inevitably end
Self-fulfilling prophecy, learned-helplessness doomer fallacy. It only ended because some assholes ended it.