CIA World Facebook Is Dead – Here Is an Attempt at Recreation

k310

Factbook, please.

oofbey

What happened to the CIA world factbook? It was great.

mindcrime

"CIA World Facebook"--> Is that a code name for PRISM or ECHELON or whatever??

MrDrMcCoy

Feature request: include the source and date last updated for all information fields.

newman314

Request for higher contrast please for my old eyes.

erikig

Thank you for including data sources as well as some basic data analysis. The scatter plots are quite helpful in analyzing some demographic assumptions that often arise when discussing economic and social development. You’ve earned yourself a bookmark :)

ulfw

Last thing I want is another Facebook

walrus01

You know what else they killed? The SIGAR.mil website (special inspector general for afghan reconstruction), the congressionally chartered oversight/audit entity that had a very well laid out website with chronological ordered list of every document that the SIGAR had ever produced. But no, let's sweep it under the rug. All of its PDF are still out there in the public domain, just scattered and not well organized in a single set of tabular pages. Here's its final report for an example of what it did. https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2145129/sigar-final-repor...

silverFork

Freedom In the world stat and couple of others - boundaries and value don't match; says 1-7 1 is the best but listed value is between 1 and 100

ChrisArchitect

Another take from 8 months ago https://worldfactbookarchive.org/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114530 )

Keyframe

The internet was so fucking great up until around the time facebook showed up and became overbearing. Starting with an era of 'multimedia' CD-ROMs and first wave of internet, through the second wave of internet around the dotcom era and the third era of "AJAX" it felt really open, accessible, full of everything. I can't tell for sure what happened around 2005 or so, youtube spawned up as well and it seemed for a while it was going great and then things started dying off, getting walled-in and dying within those walls as well.. I don't know how it happened, maybe as Hemingway put it - two ways. gradually, then suddenly. Factbook was one such place that carried memories of ye olde past. Also, CIA FACTbook, not CIA FACEbook, although when you think about it and In-Q-Tel lol.

xnx

Title does not match page and title says "Facebook" instead of "Factbook".

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 with its own conventions is incredibly tedious. Therein lies the value of Factbook; all the miserable distillation 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.