The announcement continued: "One of the CIA’s oldest and most recognizable Intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset" [sic].
The Factbook began in 1962 as an internal document intended to be widely shared but only within U.S. government agencies. It became publicly available in print in 1997 and on the web in 1997. It provided a brief summary (2-3 pages) of 258 international entities, not only established countries but also dependencies, territories, and similar areas, including their demographics, geography, communications, government, economy, and military.
It has now disappeared, vaporized. Totally gone, history and all. With no explanation as to why the decision was made.
Programmer Simon Willison called the decision "a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they've not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they've also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement". He then downloaded the 384MB .zip file for the year 2020 and extracted it into a new GitHub repository.
Worldwide Condemnation and Confusion
Librarians notice when a reference source disappears but, in most cases, they are the only ones who are paying attention. The CIA World Factbook demise was very different. Major news outlets ran in-depth stories about the cessation. At CNN, Harmeet Kaur’s "CIA terminates its World Factbook, overthrowing reference regime" featured how the termination affected a sixth-grade geography teacher. Bill Chappell at NPR (National Public Radio) reflected on his personal experiences with the Factbook in "The CIA World Factbook is dead. Here’s how I came to love it". The Associated Press (AP) story, by David Klepper, "CIA ends publication of its popular World Factbook reference tool", provided a concise history of the publication. The closure was also reported outside the U.S. in the Australian, Canadian, Indian, and Pan Arab press. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick wrote "The CIA Erased The World Factbook With No Warning… And Told Everyone To ‘Stay Curious’", saying he was reporting "from the disappearing-facts dept". He decried the CIA’s decision not only to go dark with no warning but also to eradicate all access to the backfiles.
When the news hit, the Internet Archive immediately began a data rescue mission of the latest edition of the Factbook, something it’s become very skilled at doing. It now has "18,004 webpages using an index built from anchor text, all URL parts (file names, hosts, domains), MIME Types, language, HTTP Status codes and the full text of the web pages". The problem, of course, is that preservation is not the same as updating. This achievement by the Internet Archive is stunning, but somewhat ephemeral. The CIA World Factbook was an annual publication. Without the ability to update, the current edition will remain exactly as it is now, with data gradually declining in relevance as it ages in place.
Looking for Alternatives
The library community, hearing of the removal of this basic reference source, focussed on alternatives. If we can’t consult the CIA World Factbook, where else can we go? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to that question. Alternative sources cover pieces of what the Factbook put all in one place. For some sources, part of their data was drawn from the Factbook.
Business librarians posted their favourite alternatives to the BUSLIB discussion list. Not all are free, as the Factbook had been, however, and none are a perfect replacement. Among the suggestions for free resources were GlobalEdge, the World Bank’s data on countries, UN data on countries, IMF Country Data Profiles, and OECD’s Data Explorer.
On the subscription side, there’s Statesman’s Yearbook and Europa World Yearbook, neither of which are inexpensive. Fitch Country Risk Reports are included in the ABI/INFORM database and individual countries’ statistical agencies. Clarivate offers ProQuest CultureGrams for cultural, if not in-depth economic and government information.
For the librarians, researchers, students, faculty, journalists, lawyers, travellers, and the just plain curious about the world around them, the wholesale removal of the CIA World Factbook is a heavy hit. Although librarians and researchers will probably take the time to sift through a multitude of sources to create balanced, nuanced country profiles, mildly curious tourists and sixth-grade students likely will not invest the time and effort in doing so. Where will they go? My best guess is Wikipedia. And where will Wikipedia get its data, now that it can’t access the Factbook.