CIA World Factbook 1962-2026: What's Happening to Our Government Information Sources?
This week, we quietly lost another vital information resource.
The CIA World Factbook has existed in print since 1962 as a comprehensive reference text for global geography. Originally a classified document titled The National Intelligence Factbook, a public version was made available in 1971. In 1997, the Factbook went live on CIA.gov and became an information goldmine for millions of researchers of all ages.
Basic information on population, government structures, economy, ecology, climate, terrain and more were available for all known countries and global entities. 5,000 photographs including travel photos from agency operatives was offered to the public domain, freely available for use and reuse.
The agency has not given a clear reason for the removal of the site. For the time being, we are left with a few versions retained second-hand, thanks to good old-fashioned internet altruism. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has taken thousands of snapshots of the site since 2017, and those can be found here.
You may find an error message, presumably since so many people may be looking for the Factbook's information:
There is also an archived (2020) version of the site created by Simon Willison here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020.
The Data Rescue Project is a collaborative that works to preserve public web resources and data and keep them freely available. Christopher Steven Marcum, an Open Science Advocate and formerly of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote a post for the Project that informed and inspired this one. Marcum has reserved the domain name worldfactbook.us for anyone willing to host the archived CIA World Factbook site.
The Project, along with the Internet Archive and a host of other open web advocates and workers, has been hard at work preserving and maintaining archived government websites that have been dramatically altered or outright removed by the Trump administration, including those of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Education, and Climate.gov, not to mention the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
To see more of these government resources as they were originally intended, visit the Webrecorder US Government Web Archive.