I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6984c899-6cc4-8013-a8f6-ec204ee631...
There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least in the main languages. It's crowdsourced and has citations (and where there aren't "citation needed" help identify that).
It gives you superficial, in depth and factual information, with links to sources for more details if needed.
A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
Even then, political motivation in itself does not make it inaccurate. It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible. Facts and education are the best way to fight obscurantism and totalitarianism. It’s also easy to see why a regime sliding back towards autocracy would have no interest in doing it. If they were competent, they could have continued pretending they cared and actually use it as a propaganda tool. Same with Radio Liberty and the others.
If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.
The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).
To what ends I'm still fuzzy on, but this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us from the WHO, and doing everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a few big changes.
Seems like it's to manufacture consent for a narrow overton window of capital interests, which is nothing new to this administration in particular. It keeps up the illusion of democracy by looking like changes are happening all the time as a result of voting, but really it's a race to the bottom except for the uber wealthy.
Since most voters of both corporate parties have pretty much universally internalized and accepted they're voting for the "lesser of two evils," it's safe to conclude our political system is captured and has been for decades. Furthermore, 1/3 of people refusing to vote is not solely out of laziness. Many of them have concluded the system is FUBAR.
We're given two shit options which come about through a broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-approved narratives that are disseminated.
The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both parties and has lots of blood on its hands:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Unfortunately the WHO has similar issues:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1q87aki...
Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have, thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an archaic consumption-based economy.
The CIA Factbook has played zero role in giving the US any measurable power.
at least them, yes
https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.g...
If it is no longer published, the version on the Internet Archive will become out of date.
The issues start when you try to compare data, because different sources will use different methodologies
That's one way of putting it.
Most volunteers on Wikipedia do an excellent job, but sometimes the absence of traditional editorial structures shows its limitations.
Imagine being an editor of Britannica. Without having domain knowledge into absolutely everything, you are forced to trust domain experts.
Wikipedia has a marked advantage when it comes to building that trust, as the articles have been written under public scrutiny and with a great deal of discussion.
What else are you looking for with "traditional editorial structures"? Consistency in quality and completeness, which Wikipedia lacks. However, whenever an article has lower standards, Wikipedia is happy to point that out to the reader, and allow further refinement. A more traditional encyclopedia would simply omit the article entirely.
I'm not really seeing what a traditional editorial structure would be gaining anyone, seems like it would just be a smaller encyclopedia.
That was the last year they published it all in one convenient zip file. Serving 2026 requires a longer running scrape of the Internet Archive.
Thanks, stranger.
It would. But you are forgetting the whole editorial trust thing, which is what made it so useful and well cited.
Discussed a few days ago as well
What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"
"The C Programming Language"?
Less tongue-in-cheek: I'm sure your embassy issues travel advisories.
In its own FAQs[0], the CIA previously noted that many third-party companies that once provided free data now require expensive subscriptions or restrict use via licensing. These likely made it increasingly difficult to maintain the Factbook’s rigorous standards for comprehensive global data.
Ensuring the accuracy of thousands of data points for 258 international entities required a "monstrous workload" of vetting and reviewing by highly trained officers. Given the "do more with less" mandate, this is the result.
[0]https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/
This ending seems fitting for the world where artificially manufacturing consent is rampant.
As Nietzsche once said: "There are no facts, only interpretations"
If you happen across a random book burning, can you confidently assume which side they are voting for.
Nowadays, nobody even pretends to not be a liar, from any side. There is no debate that even attempts to look at the facts - it's vibes all the way down and fuck you if you don't agree, only money and guns matter. In the long run, this can't hold.
Spoiler: The CIA was formed around rich people's interests and continue to represent them, not in fact, the American people. Harsh reality but helpful to know.
George Orwell (1984)
The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.
PS: and I live in Eastern Europe, far far away from the USA.
"President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was and has weakened America's ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive. Wait until they start paying for what comes next,"
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699388/is-the-u-s-head...
They'll just blame liberals and double down on the authoritarianism as they've always done.
The administration is dispensing with the institutions of soft power. I don't think it's the main goal so much as a consequence of their worldview. Soft power is essentially worthless to people who have no interest in maintaining a facade of international cooperation.
Maybe the traffic made it not worth the cost?
And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.
Soft power is spending pennies to convince other countries to do your dirty work.
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
I thought the CIA was formed to represent rich people's interests and maybe in that way the Factbook was another trick to lend legitimacy to their organization.
> In 1971, the Factbook was created as an annual summary of the NIS studies and in 1973 it supplanted the NIS encyclopedic studies as CIA’s publication of basic intelligence. It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook.
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/history-of-the-world-factb...
[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/canada/
[2] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/So they do everything they can do get rid of facts.
The primary reason they spread disinformation is not to get people to believe the nonsense (which is merely an occasional bonus), it is to get people to give up on finding the truth. Once people have no substantial quantity or quality of truth, they can be entirely manipulated.
This regime is following the standard path to authoritarianism.
Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.
where we're going, we don't need "facts"
Not that that has anything to do with the current administration deciding to kill a useful apolitical resource that has served countless people for 80 years.
The World Facebook is one of the most cited sources on Wikipedia.
As an example in recent memory: the World Factbook has been heavily cited lately to argue against the idea of a genocide in Gaza. Maybe a year or so ago, the Factbook was updated, and it claimed that the population in Gaza had grown: no decrease, no inflection point in growth, nothing to see... That claim was in heavy rotation, as soon as it was published.
That the espionage agency of the main weapons supplier to Israel would publish such a claim felt grotesque, and the claim itself seemed ridiculous, impossible, based on even evidenced peripheral information (the 90+% of people displaced, the destruction of all hospitals, the deaths of so many aid workers, the levels of starvation), but... the Factbook claimed it, so it became true to many.
It would be impossible to quantify the effect of this, how many days of horror it added, how many more debates those trying to stop the killing had to do, how much fewer donations were sent to aid workers. But an effect it certainly had.
If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time constrained.
It being a technology that inherently has plausible deniability when it for example starts referring to itself as Mecha-Hitler is a feature, not a bug!
yeah it's game-able, and a bad actor can ruin work, but we're comparing it to a literal singular gospel source of information from a three letter agency.
p.s. I noticed I used an em dash, appropriately or not. i'm leaving it in. I like it. maybe im turning bot. changing the way I speak/type to avoid being taken that way irks me to hell.
If the government has somewhere to tell you what it thinks is true, you can use that to double-check another part of the government that's misleading you on that same data. You can also double-check it against other sources of truth to gain insight about potential manipulation in one or more of the systems.
Here's one hot take:
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/a-well-informed-electorat...