Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
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.
The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.
It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot.
The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited.
There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.
One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited.
Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.
Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases
At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.
AIs that were trained on data obtained through naughty channels actively avoid citing sources and full passages of reference text, otherwise they'd give the game away. This seems to increase the chance of them entirely hallucinating sources too.
Have you used one recently? The big providers all cite sources if give a research prompt.
Sometimes they hallucinate them, or if they exist, sources include blatant nonsense (like state owned propaganda, such as RT) / don't support the claims made by the output.
what's worse is when they cite clearly LLM generated articles from web
Isnt it already in AI as the prior version were publicly and should be in training corpus?
The World Factbook was updated weekly.
> Wikipedia
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.
There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia but it needs sources to cite since it doesn't allow original research and the World Factbook is an important one.
Looking at the underlying study, this isn’t evidence of bias. It’s evidence of correlation between Republicans and negative sentiment.
If you look at the sentiment for public figures given, the bottom one is, for example, Brett Kavanaugh. Well, he was credibly accused of sexual assault during his confirmation hearings, which was a huge deal at the time. Someone with that on their record will probably be read as negative, but, I mean, not the editors’ fault!
When it comes to politics and studies... We all should know by now to research those sources too, right?
"The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit[5] conservative think tank."
It is a report generated by this conservative organization (that presumably gets donations from many other conservatives). Is there a chance that the report itself is suspect?
"Bias" here is just sentiment analysis. The report (from a conservative think-tank) is not about factual errors. Plus, the effect they find shows only for US politics, where there is really not much of a "left".
> Findings show that Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms representative of right-leaning political orientation than to their left-leaning counterparts
Is that a bias or just reality?
Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain sight with crypto pumps and dumps, people running away from responsibility, people getting caught engaging in sexual acts in public, and on and on and on. Their left-wing equivalents are... extremely mild by comparison. What, some run of the mill corruption and sexual comments that resulted in resignations?
If go past "right wing is associated with more negative things", and look into what those negative things are, you'd realise it's just reality. Just because there are two parties and two categories of political leanings doesn't mean they are somehow equal.
Yes, the left engages only in "mostly peaceful protests"
See the positive. At least you would not get a fail on your school essay about Greenland...
Surely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)
Oh wow, didn't at all notice that while typing lol. I guess my swipe-to-type skills aren't as good as I thought they were
I initially read it as Facebook as well and almost celebrated :D
> Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
> 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.
there used to be a higher alignment in the US between political motivations and morality.
> a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe
This is like how children think about the world, please god liberals get a grip on reality
You're too naive if you think it's completely true, but too cynical if you think it's completely false.
The Factbook has always been widely regarded as a reliable source of information.
I would hope that most people do understand that the CIA is a heavily biased source to use on information on other countries.. like wtf?
Grokipedia for the win. It's fact checked !
I guess your sarcasm is not popular in this thread. Perhaps Musk-fatigue.
20 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total words in books. Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K total words.
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.
Over 30 years ago, was working on a presentation software that shipped with a bunch of (vector) clip art and remember using the (raster) graphics from the CIA World Factbook as a base to create vector (WMF) versions of the flags of various ‘new’ countries at the time (following the breakup of Yugoslavia) that were missing from the set that our art vendor provided to us.
The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).
Bit confused, what's this to do with the CIA World Factbook?
> 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
So the factbook is an actual book too? That's what I missed, I thought it was a webpage so this was referring to some other post.
Of all the organisations you’d think the CIA would understand the value of soft power and having some level of control of facts being published
They do. Their "publishing" of their "facts" happen all on social media now.
Obviously, facts do not play a big role in the current government's world view.
Truly dark times when we can't even trust the CIA anymore.
The CIA was formed in 1947 and the first known controversy was in 1953. And has a whole list of controversies since then. From giving citizens LSD, wiretapping citizens, to supporting Central American cocaine distribution. And this is where you draw the line on trustworthiness? Lol
That was a joke that violently wooshed over your head. You might need to see a doctor to check for whiplash.
You and sarcasm should get better acquainted.
CIA-distributed LSD would be a weird trip
We have to draw the line somewhere
This is a good joke, but it's also true that the whole charade of trying to look "institutional" and "fact-based" was a pretty decent way to go about pursuing the US agenda. "Hey we are the good guys, we show you real numbers" was a good line to push, and it could often show up the opposition as cranks and liars.
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.
I really wish more people funded Britannica or some other traditional encyclopedia.
Most volunteers on Wikipedia do an excellent job, but sometimes the absence of traditional editorial structures shows its limitations.
Part of the value of the factbook is that it is kept up to date.
If it is no longer published, the version on the Internet Archive will become out of date.
The Factbook dates from a time when this was the most convenient source of updated concise summaries of all countries. It didn’t necessarily go into great detail except for countries important to the US national interest.
This has been eclipsed by Wikipedia, the information there is far more comprehensive and govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections.
Where do you think the information on Wikipedia comes from? Not that Wikipedia strongly relies on The World Factbook, but it can't exist without other secondary sources like these.
Wikipedia is actually the secondary source when someone reads a page on it, and it requires primary sources (like factbooks) to cite to exist.
This is incorrect. Wikipedia relies primarily on secondary sources, which makes it a tertiary source, and it describes itself this way.[1] The World Factbook does not collect the information it provides, making it a secondary source.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PSTS
It can be both. It uses Primary and Secondary sources. That is why you check the references and use them appropriately.
> Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.
Primary sources aren't completely disallowed, but they are definitely discouraged.
The problem is who checks the sources. Of the what billions of sources, how many have actually been verified?
Also, when there are conflicts, who decides what the ‘facts’ are, eh?
is is the Gulf of America or not?
Nobody, you just mention the different points of view that are in the sources.
Which nobody does (really) because it turns into a giant narcissist shit fight then for who can come up with the most absurd ‘truthy’ answer for publicity.
Everyone has to end up filtering at some point or it’s all just noise.
Wikipedia does not allow primary sources.
Which is often stupid when the only people who know the truth are the people who were there. Hearsay from secondary sources is not an improvement in that case.
That’s why I used to like Quora - you would often see an answer provided by the primary (and only definitive) source for questions.
Most countries have some kind of statistics department that publishes that kind of data in great detail.
The issues start when you try to compare data, because different sources will use different methodologies
And some methodologies use false information.
> govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections
That's one way of putting it.
The Factbook dates from a time when facts mattered
Can we please, please not outsource everything to Wikipedia? Many of the editors there are hardly impartial
And the CIA is impartial? ;)
Do please take note of the fact that I did not include "We should trust the CIA" in my comment
That sucks. It was the first thing I would check when someone said, "Hey, do you want to go to São Paulo/Oman/Laos?"
What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"
> 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.
Since the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.
There I go, hoarding data again.
Thanks, stranger.
No link to the World Factbook in the article, sloppy journalism.
It's time to sunset the CIA. “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
in a world where "alternative facts" rule, this is just a natural conclusion
A shared knowledge of factual information is the enemy of a fascist state.
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.
My theory of the current US administration and its support is one of ideological stupidity. The idea behind ideological stupidity is the wish that the world is simple. If "classical fascism" made a promise of order in a tumultuous world, the new right makes a promise of simplicity: the world is not as complicated as the experts say. To maintain simplicity, any serious scholarship and study, which invariably points to complexity, is to be expunged.
Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.
Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
Soft power includes positive perception. Every time someone learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American government and then freely available to the rest of the world, that shapes perception.
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.
We have Hollywood and spy movies/series now.
As an anecdote example, I've never ever accessed said Factbook, but I've heard about it enough times to remember that such thing exists and that USA govt. is collecting a relatively objective fact list. So yeah, it was a tiny bit of soft power of sorts. It showed that USA cares about outside world, in some way at least.
PS: and I live in Eastern Europe, far far away from the USA.
You might be underestimating the reach, you've got schoolchildren around the world using it as it's usually the most convenient source you're allowed to cite for this data
I grew up outside the US. I have a distinct memory of using the Factbook for homework assignments and being told it is a reliable source of information. That shapes people's perceptions of the US and the CIA from a young age.
Or maybe a conscious decision, as neoconservative Robert Kagan writes:
"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...
> Wait until they start paying for what comes next
They'll just blame liberals and double down on the authoritarianism as they've always done.
One of Trump administration's main goal is to destroy US soft power
I agree, well mostly.
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.
I remember this from literally 20 years ago.
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.
Under the current administration it wouldn't surprise me if they decided in their last budget cutting meeting to indiscriminately erase everything with the wildcard "fact" in the project's name.
Like how they deny visas to fact checkers.
I don't know if you jest but thats exactly what they did with many other words. What a timeline.
“Soft power” refers usually to credibility. The point of the Factbook is to be a credible public resource for an entity that would otherwise not have much.
Credibility is not what aoft power means, though they are related. Power is the ability to get other people to act in your interest. Hard power is when that is done through immediate, direct economic or military coercion. Soft power is everything else.
In International Relations, my #1 or #2 hobby, credibility does not refer to soft power. (my number 1 hobby is philosophy)
Credibility is the core currency of soft power, whether one views its ultimate goal as manufacturing consent or fostering genuine cultural attraction. Without that perceived reliability, the indicator "soft" loses it's meaning.
>Credibility is the core currency of soft power, whether one views its ultimate goal as manufacturing consent or fostering genuine cultural attraction.
Not sure its worth dissecting this, but there is a lot of grey area in your claim of the meaning of Credibility. (Credibility and cultural attraction? Pretty sure these have little correlation. Dictators can make creditable threats.) Further, its a debatable claim that there is a 'core currency' of soft power.
As a contextualist, I am not going to die on this hill for your personal meaning of Credibility. But I can attest that your conviction in your claim is stronger than any International Relations Realist practitioner would make.
You can make propaganda without lying, by choosing what metrics you value over others for example, by adding them or omitting them or implying whether a stat increasing is positive or negative.
Also choosing which methodology is the "right" one to measure a specific number.
There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you just have to be globally consistent
Interesting. I read about this. "Concealment and spinning" are two ways to not lie.
What is this soft power and what can the US do with it?
Having friends means that you can build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade. It prevents those friends from undermining you in a lot of cases. It makes them help you when you need, e.g. to get your hands on someone plotting attacks against you. It makes them more likely to trade with you under advantageous terms. I am sure you could think about at least a dozen other cases in a couple of minutes.
Soft power is spending pennies to convince other countries to do your dirty work.
> build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade
How much of that actually came from soft power rather than "hard power", like USA actions in WW2?
Shape the world to benefit the US - having US dollar be strong primarily.
I believe Trump has asked that exact question. But also asked how much it costs and whether it can be privatized.
Make the dollar the global currency and reap the benefits of facilitating gentle commerce?
Did you forget the /s?
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.
Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that.
Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
What took so long? They've had Wikipedia for years already.
Where do you think Wikipedia gets its information?
The World Facebook is one of the most cited sources on Wikipedia.
This is incredibly frustrating, something so neutrally appreciated and used by everyone dropped. For no reason at all, but it’s not hard to infer why. Can’t have those pesky facts getting in the way of gaslighting the masses.
ODNI also did not publish its quadrennial Global Trends report last year, even though it was written. It probably talked too much about the rise of fascism.
Facts always create problems for authoritarian regimes.
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.
This regime is just following the same path openly.
Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.
TruthSocial is the largest distributor of propaganda and fake news. That's pretty hypocritic.
It seems like it won't be a popular opinion given the comments, but: a three-letter-agency, especially the CIA, maintaining a "factbook" always seemed like an oxymoron to me. Indeed it was an oft-cited source in research and school essays, and for the most part it was certainly accurate, but, as many tools of propaganda, that veneer of accuracy could be a useful cover for the small portions of reality where truth was inconvenient.
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.
An outdated service that belongs to the era of encyclopedia. Wikipedia moved us past it. ChatGPT has moved us so far past it, it's become a relic.
Isn't it essentially a source for both of those things?
If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time constrained.
Which means resources like real encyclopaedias will again become financially viable.
It aggregates many public sources, so much of it is findable, but not all.
That's the idea, yes. Kill all primary sources, wound all secondary sources (examples: WaPo or "Grokipedia"), convince everyone that they should use this tertiary source whose full control is in the hands of a very few.
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!
ChatGPT and Wikipedia are not primary sources of information.
The World Factbook wasn't prone to hallucinations, intentional omissions, the whims of billionaires, or the unstated goals of astroturfing groups.
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...
I don’t think this is true, some of the data is not clean and is created through estimates and modeling, I’d not trust ChatGpt to get this right, and adding your own uncited models or estimates to wikipedia will get it deleted.
LLM’s memory recall is extremely lossy. Facts should not be lossy.
This is so stupid. Wikipedia needs sources and citations in order to construct articles, and chatgpt needs training data to build it's models. The CIA world fact book sits at the core of training and wikipedia citations. It is the inception point of all these other services you use.