The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/the-world-factbook/
@simon "He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future."
So we're literally at 1984.
@simon SO sad. It was great resource for geography classes.
@simon A good source of info about countries. I used that a lot when I was travelling for work
@simon just mirror it on your own site - don't give it to ms for god's sake, now it is going to need antibiotics
@simon it does suck, and to top it all off the condescendingly smug and vapid announcement of the closure sucks. The attitude that a website is just marketing, and isn't an information source to be maintained over time is shockingly prevalent in society.
@simon what a shame. I used this extensively in undergrad (International Affairs)
@simon is there a clearer metaphor of the United States closing itself off from the world and its government closing itself off from any public conversation? Stunning.
@simon I think it was the word "fact" that let the fascists react. Although, as a European, I would never trust the CIA as a source of facts. Never.
Thanks for saving data.
@simon removing sources of information is entirely consistent with preferring an uneducated uninformed electorate. I believe it was Reagan‘s advisors that warned him that an educated electorate was a threat to their policies.
So now when the Dear Leader stands up to pontificate about other countries there is no CIA source available to contradict him.
The US is now a backward country with increasing levels of illiteracy and education becoming increasingly unattainable for most
@simon thx Simon. 🕵️♂️📖
@simon I think I found a 2022 version in the archive.
@bit @simon sadly that is only an archive of the homepage created by perma.cc You can see what it looks like by replaying the WARC content at:
The page looks good, but if you try to navigate to other pages you can see they weren't included. Perma focuses on archiving specific pages. I didn't realize they push their content to @internetarchive though, which is cool.
I see that now. I found 64 more hits on the archive, but those pages are also incomplete.
I also found the complete World Factbook from 2024-2025 in pdf format. All 7288 pages of it. However the source is slightly less reputable. 😁
@bit fortunately, the website plays back in the Wayback Machine remarkably well:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/
Thanks CIA for making an easy to archive website. @simon @internetarchive
@simon facts are the enemy of MAGA.
Thank you. Great publishing. The internet archive may have more.
@simon the Wayback Machine might help.
@simon USA own everything in the book. Cry also.
@simon This was one of first things I used on the internet. I think it was on fed world.gov back in the Gopher days.
@simon Aww, the CIA stopped being fun now
Was it updated past 2020? Probably not, huh?
Yes it was updated.
Could be the leadup to denying the existence of sovereign countries?
@simon
Pages of that book saddened dictators for decades.
Although dictators are being ousted not by factbooks but other means, but even just making dictators sad a bit is better than licking their boots.
@simon No!!! I used that as a reference and source for a Spanish paper that I wrote 😿 (it was a small paper for a simple Spanish course but still it meant a lot to me)
It was about the “Alfombras” in Antigua Guatemala during Holy Week. 😿
@simon Better to kill in secrecy than mess with complicated disinformation.
Something in there was inconvenient.
2016 version made it into archive.org
Might be good to host the 2020 version and submit it there as well
@simon That is so weird! what the heck?
@simon damn, I kind of knew this was coming. It was such an important resource for fact checking/verifying information against reputable sources
They had a most excellent editorial voice, as demonstrated by this "what's new" entry from December 10th 2020 about the height of Mount Everest https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/docs/whatsnew.html
@simon that’s really strange but I guess i shouldn’t be surprised.
