zlacker

>>mxfh+(OP)
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.

>>shevy-+em
Kids who grew up playing Carmen Sandiego will definitely remember it fondly

>>pimlot+9u
I played a bunch of that too, was that a cited source for it? Don’t remember. I do recall that the very-early-90s geopolitics simulation game Shadow President contained large portions of the fact book in its in-game information system (with citations, which is my first recollection of ever knowing of the thing by name)

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)