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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.
Can you add context on what Gopher is for the unknowning? I searched for it but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) is the only seemingly relavent thing I found not sure if thats exactly what your refering too?
Gopher was a text-mode, menu-based, hypertext-based precursor to the World Wide Web. It's what we used before the Web and web browsers came along.
Here's a good image of your typical Gopher page: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Gopher-Nedir-EN....
This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.
I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)
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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
Lynx supports gopher [0] and check out Bombadillo [1], it's a stripped down "small web" (gopher, gemini, finger) only terminal browser.
Gopher is sort of like Latin, it's a dead protocol, but is still useful.
0. https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support...
For Gopher, I used to use a little terminal browser called Phetch:
https://github.com/xvxx/phetch
It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic.
Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/
This makes me wonder if someone is putting the latest version of the Factbook on Gopher now. It might be a fun little project?
PS. Lagrange is a beautiful piece of software.
I kinda of remember when Mosaic supported all the protocols. One would just replace http with whatever protocol wanted to connect to the host with.
gopher:// or ftp://
TUI web browsers exist. But many sites are not usable.
Gemini is a newer protocol influenced by Gopher.[1]
I'm pretty nostalgic for Gopher. If the graphical web hadn't been so mind blowing I would have realized how great it was at the time. Before the web had graphical browser I thought it was pretty useless compared to gopher.
> Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical.
What does that even mean?
There was a time when only institutions were on the internet. Eventually one could get dial-up connection to a commercial entity. NYC's had an early commercial service provided by PANIX (Public Access Unix) and the San Francisco bay area had the Well.
This was just a terminal connection where one could connect to other hosts on the internet through a dial-up connection. The modem would connect to a computer that had a route to an internet gateway. PANIX provided a Unix user account one could dial into. One didn't need an IP address to get on the internet. The difference was that an internet host couldn't find/connect to the terminal one was browsing on. There was no "addressability". If one downloaded a file from the internet it didn't end up on the machine one was using. The file ended up in a directory on the computer one was dialed into. The second step of retrieving the file involved downloading the file from your home directory on the Unix machine one was dialed into. In my case I think I needed a modem that supported the Zmodem protocol.
Eventual the dial-up providers were able to provide IP addresses using the SLIP (serial link IP). Once one had an IP the machine was on equal footing of all the other internet hosts. The computers could exchange information directly. This provided an easy way for a web browser to directly connect from the machine one was using and the host one was connected to. This is when graphical browser became available to everyone with an IP address. The graphics became inline and could be rendered directly on the client.
I believe there were ways prior to this to inline render graphics I never experienced them. AOL used to be a closed network with graphics and no internet gateway. CompuServe may have been similar. I never used either of those systems.
Outside of my college's library connection I only accessed the internet through PANIX until the internet boom. I learned about PANIX through an ad in the back of Computer Shopper.
Mosaic, the first graphical browser was developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They were of course not bound by dial-up or similar and probably didn't care for commercial offerings of connectivity in their priorities in development.
And before it, slip had been available and standardized for some time.
I would say what drove the adoption of commercial services was the graphical web, not the other way around.
I think the point I would want to make is the commercial availability of IP addresses drove the graphical browser adoption.
I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of Dang) and took the subway to his apartment to see a graphical browser in action. I don't know how long it took to actually get my own IP address but I know it took me a few days to get a MacPPP connection to actually work over slip.
That implies that you got on the bandwagon because it was a graphical web? At my department in Sweden it was an overnight adoption when we found Mosaic.
And I can see you struggle to get PPP to work over slip!
Prior to the Mosaic I thought Gopher was superior to a text based WWW. Once ISDN became available I used an Ascend Pipeline 50 and that made IP addresses available across an entire network. The office I was working at also immediately adopted Mosaic/Netscape at that time. Getting PPP to work was definitely heavy lifting for me. Getting an IP address as an individual was difficult in the early days.
I feel really old now. :(
Don't; I'm pretty old myself, and I've only a vague idea of what gopher is because it was never used in this part of the world, and internet access also came pretty late. Maybe GP is in a similar position.
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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.
In my experience they just add random links at the bottom that are often unrelated to the response they give; there’s absolutely no guarantee that they did read them or that their response is based on them.
Unfortunately, the citations are generally quite low quality and have in my experience a high rate of not actually supporting the text they're attached to.
This is on par with humans, honestly. I’ve dug into cited studies by consulting firms that were 100% false.
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
wtf are you conversing with LLMs that you regularly are running into "state owned propaganda" in the references? my "blatant nonsense" detector is going off...
My favorite is when it cites 5 sources, and 1 of them is a real source, and then the other 4 are short form junk that point to the first one as the source. So basically its just picked one article and summarized it for you and not picked any info from any other places. Oh and bonus points when I type the exact same prompt into a search engine, and that 1 source is the top search result anyways.
Do you people even use the models or do you just lie about them?
https://chatgpt.com/share/6984c899-6cc4-8013-a8f6-ec204ee631...
You're using the Research model that isn't available to Free users. As a pupil myself, I can vouch for the fact that nobody is using the Research models here.
Even if a pupil does pay, they will either be too lazy to wait the nearly 10 minutes it takes for the AI to do its research, or they actually care about getting good grades and therefore won't outsource their research to AI.
You can replicate on the free tier. You should try it. I'm just pointing out that the loudest anti-ai voices often either haven't used the models at all or are basing their bad opinions on outdated versions. Any opinion made about ChatGPT with GPT 3.5 is basically irrelevant at this point.
No worries, we can rely on our Dear Leader and his team of experts to keep us informed.
Isnt it already in AI as the prior version were publicly and should be in training corpus?
The World Factbook was updated weekly. This was because facts changed.
Every time an article like this gets posted some commenter INEVITABLY brings up "isn't this solved because AI" and god it is so depressing. Apparently a whole lot of people out there existing in the world genuinely think fucking LLMs are going to be reliable stewards of knowledge.
We are fucking cooked.
Ai training can be thought of like human training (school), much of what you learn shapes you but you forget the details. We need to continue to have real sources of info.
Sure but that doesn't mean it'll perfectly retrieve information it's trained on. There's a lot of conflicting sources, hallucinations, etc.
"Facebook" :)
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
> 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.
>There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia
Well, except for the very obvious political bias
https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-politica...
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!
The accusations weren’t particularly credible and similar slander campaigns against people like Joe Biden aren’t nearly as prominent.
Even notorious dictators like Mao Zedong get treated with kid gloves as long as they’re on the left: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
Kid gloves? The cites text literally says:
> His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his reign, mainly due to starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour in laogai, and mass executions
What's "kid gloves" about that?
Let's contrast with the the farthest thing from a leftwing dictator we can find, the quintessential rightwing one, Adolf Hitler. Here's the intro to his Wikipedia page:
> Adolf Hitler[a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany during the Nazi era, which lasted from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party,[b] becoming the chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.[c] Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 under his leadership marked the outbreak of the Second World War. Throughout the ensuing conflict, Hitler was closely involved in the direction of German military operations as well as the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
Note how the atrocities are last, same as Mao.
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"
Citation needed for mostly violent protest.
"Bias isn't bias if I agree with the side it's taking!"
It's not bias if it's factual reality. You not liking it doesn't make it bias.
It is bias if your "factual reality" over-exaggerates the "facts" for the "bad guys" and under-exaggerates / completely neglects to report on the "good guys"
Which is true for all propaganda outlets.
But to put it with John Steward, what if reality itself has a left leaning bias?
What if left leaning people have empirically broader empathy [0] which could imply that right leaning people have in tendency worse personalities. I guess you would attest yet another biased article here.
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There are also genuinely good guys and bad guys. Reality, itself, has a bias. To think that ideology doesn't correlate at all with how moral you might act is, frankly, stupid. Not all positions are created equal.
See the positive. At least you would not get a fail on your school essay about Greenland...
> 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.
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You're too naive if you think it's completely true, but too cynical if you think it's completely false.
only as cynical as the CIA :)
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?
Heavily biased sources can still provide useful facts, if you're careful.
For example, the IDF now accepts Hamas's death toll estimates after decrying them as inflated for years. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
Grokipedia for the win. It's fact checked !
I guess your sarcasm is not popular in this thread. Perhaps Musk-fatigue.
Its not sarcasm. Grok if an awesome alternative view if you accept that you should use your brain to make your own opinion and not just accept wikipedia (which can be wrong) as truth.
Most sarcasm worsens discussion. The comment guidelines say Don't be snarky.[1]
Its not snarky. Grok if an awesome alternative view if you accept that you should use your brain to make your own opinion and not just accept wikipedia (which can be wrong) as truth.
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.
The CIA Factbook being publicy available since 1971 has existed longer than the internet
That's a great logo. What a travesty.
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Obviously, facts do not play a big role in the current government's world view.
Like Ken Jennings said about this: "you have wonder if the problem was 'world,' 'facts,' or 'books'"
Ironically, most people who think that also think the opposite of the previous administration.
Truly dark times when we can't even trust the CIA anymore.
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.
> In the long run, this can't hold.
It's always held, management just changes. Money and power are two fundamental constants to human nature.
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
I would love to get some of that.
We have to draw the line somewhere
Then don't watch "Everything is a Rich Man's Trick" that was what showed me a bit of the under dealings of how that organization was structured and created.
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.
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
It's part of a multi-pronged approach to intentionally cede US soft power.
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.
Fox News figure-head cabinet might not be the most, ah, strategically minded group of people.
I'm not saying the Trump regime is filled with people beholden to or influenced by Russia... but if they were I don't see what they'd be doing differently.
The ends are to create vacuums for big businesses to come in and provide the same services, for private profit rather than public benefit
Soft power is just a buzzword to give value to things that have zero demonstrable value.
The CIA Factbook has played zero role in giving the US any measurable power.
The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.[1]
True, TSA has been very valuable in airline safety. Think of it as "soft terrorism prevention".
Millions of people around the world looked at the CIA world factbook. It was useful. It gives you a warm feeling about the USA and the CIA. Warm feelings are useful.
If you deny this argument do you claim:
1. No one used it or it wasn't useful, or
2. They used it robotically and formed no feelings, or
3. It is of absolutely no use to have people like your organization or country.
right. because there's zero demonstrative value in USAID giving aid to foreign countries which is why we just left.
...and then china moved in.
The real problem is that the problem isnt binary or immediately causal. "This happened, and then that happened".
These problems are slowly developing with more than 1 term in the equation.
China doesnt build silk road 2.0 because of one little decision. It's an accumulation, and by then it's too late.
What's the Chinese version of the factbook? European? Canadian? Why aren't they all moving in on all this sweet soft power?
In the early days of Wikipedia many articles were taken directly from the CIA Factbook since it was public domain. Numerous Wikipedians have fond memories of it and remembers it as something the US did that was actually good and not evil shit. That and America's Army. Cheap ways to gain goodwill. Maybe in the grand scheme of things it didn't matter.
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I agree. People use "soft power" as the reason the US should do so many things for free, but the benefits aren't coming back to the US.
The argument against abandoning soft power is that it's going to cost a lot more in hard power to maintain the same status. We'll see how it plays out.
> 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.
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They do understand, that's why they're doing this. This is a fundamentally anti-fact administration — when facts aren't known, you can fabricate reality for the masses, which is what they want.
They do. Their "publishing" of their "facts" happen all on social media now.
++1
at least them, yes
The Internet Archive has a mirror:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.g...
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.
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.
So, not, not allowed.
"The concept of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources originated with the academic discipline of historiography. The point was to give historians a handy way to indicate how close the source of a piece of information was to the actual events.[a]
Importantly, the concept developed to deal with "events", rather than ideas or abstract concepts. A primary source was a source that was created at about the same time as the event, regardless of the source's contents. So while a dictionary is an example of a tertiary source, an ancient dictionary is actually a primary source—for the meanings of words in the ancient world."
"All sources are primary for something
Every source is the primary source for something, whether it be the name of the author, its title, its date of publication, and so forth. For example, no matter what kind of book it is, the copyright page inside the front of a book is a primary source for the date of the book's publication. Even if the book would normally be considered a secondary source, if the statement that you are using this source to support is the date of its own publication, then you are using that book as a primary source."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
The problem is who checks the sources. Of the what billions of sources, how many have actually been verified?
>who checks the sources
I do, when I’m reading something and accuracy matters. Anybody who cares about accuracy will investigate the sources. I know people will complain that “nobody” does this, but it is essential, without checking sources you are just casually reading. That goes for books and all media consumption. If a book or any media (ahem Tucker) doesn’t give you enough information to be able to look something up, that is rather a red flag of obfuscation.
The thing is, there’s really no good way to check a lot of the numbers you see in sources like the World Factbook.
Take population estimates for instance. Much of the world either doesn’t have the state capacity or can’t be trusted to maintain accurate, publicly known population figures. There are some countries where they haven’t had a census in decades and their official population figures are entrusted to numbers provided by regional governments which receive national funding on a per capita basis. Every region has an incentive to inflate their population numbers and, in a system where they’re all competing for funding from the central government, this eventually becomes common practice. Even national governments have little incentive to share honest figures with the rest of the world, and national governments that aren’t even accountable to their own people like China and Russia are also well practiced in keeping secrets. And population is probably one of the easiest things to measure.
The problem is that some people just accept the first number they find and are militant about not thinking beyond that point. If you tell them the radiation meter tops out at 3.6 roentgen, they say “3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible”.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico_naming_controve... There's an entire article on it.
Now imagine that for toilet paper over the top, or over the bottom, or sitting on top of the toilet tank. And everything in between.
We have plenty of bits, at least.
Encyclopedias are by definition tertiary sources.
Wikipedia does not allow primary sources.
This is very much false, Primary sources only play a supporting role on Wikipedia, but they are definitely allowed. For example, if you're writing an article on Apple you can cite Apple for what Wikipedia calls "uncontroversial self-description". However, before that, you have to establish the notability of Apple through reliable secondary independent sources. The contents and focus of articles is also dictated by secondary sources. For example, if you take a controversial subject like Urbit, the article would have to reflect the priorities of (mostly critical) journalistic pieces on Urbit. You can cite its documentation for a technical description (that would be "uncontroversial self-description", as I mentioned before), but this would have to be a small part of the article, because it wouldn't reflect the focus of secondary 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.
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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.
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> 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
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.
Wikipedia is Creative Commons. Someone could conceivably publish a dead tree version that goes through an editor / editorial process.
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.
Trusting domain experts is precisely what I like in Britannica. I want an environment where real domain experts are not drowned by a mob of midwits.
Arguably, you get more and better domain experts in Wikipedia. I have a set of Britannicas, it's severely lacking in citations and definitely out of date, no matter how new.
The question of article quality has been studied from the very beginning. Wikipedia almost always wins.
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.
I have that up and running now for the 2020 edition: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020 - repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/
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.
There I go, hoarding data again.
Thanks, stranger.
> it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it
It would. But you are forgetting the whole editorial trust thing, which is what made it so useful and well cited.
I'm not suggesting continued changes, but just preservation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
Discussed a few days ago as well
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.
Advisories on https://travel.state.gov/
3rd discussion, simultaneously on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899808
in a world where "alternative facts" rule, this is just a natural conclusion
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted.”
George Orwell (1984)
It's time to sunset the CIA. “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
The only useful thing CIA ever did is gone. :(
My theory of the current US administration and its support is one of ideological stupidity. Ideological stupidity wishes to see the world as 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.
End of an era. We used to get it on CD in school.
No link to the World Factbook in the article, sloppy journalism.
No, the World Factbook has been totally taken down. If you try to go to a page, e.g. the entry for Canada[1] it redirects to the statement[2] which the article does cite. That's all that's left online of it, there's nothing else to link to
[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/Not to be confused with The World Almanac and Book of Facts, which is still publishing after 140 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac)
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.
Hollywood and spy movies/series predate the web.
What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes learning about other countries.
Americans famously have near-zero knowledge of other countries. Nothing valuable was lost in this aspect. You need something new.
I had something similar to this talking globe[1] when I was a kid and it was amazing for raising my geopolitical awareness. You tap on a country with the pen and it tells you the name and some facts about it. Even if I hadn't learned anything, I had fun pressing "Azerbaijan" over and over because 10-year-old me thought it was a funny spelling and pronunciation.
[1]https://www.walmart.com/ip/World-Globe-for-Kids-Interactive-...
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.
Reminds me of the forbidden word lists that they created at the beginning of the second Trump term: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
“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 soft 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.
It's not that complex, good faith builds good will.
It's a shame we can't have nice things.
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?
I think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."
Shape the world to benefit the US - having US dollar be strong primarily.
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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).
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facts?
where we're going, we don't need "facts"
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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.
I don't understand why they created or obtained control of the world Factbook in the first place, anyone have a story around this?
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.
> on July 26, CIA was officially born. Just a few months later, on October 1, CIA assumed all responsibility for the JANIS basic intelligence program. Shortly thereafter, JANIS was renamed the National Intelligence Survey (NIS), but continued along the same tradition, providing policymakers and military leaders with up-to-date data, maps, and other reference materials.
> 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...
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.
Your comment was more duplicative than the article.[1]
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And yet here we are
You don't care about accuracy? Or duplication?
Trump will soon be issuing the "World Alternative Factbook" as a natural replacement
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.
I cannot escape the overall impression that Trump is bankrupting America and we increasingly cannot afford to provide even the most basic of government services.
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.
Not sure I understand this comment. Trump deserves points for being transparent about his disdain for liberal democratic values? Not sure that's a flex. Hmmm.
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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.
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.
Look up actual data instead of making assumptions. Around 130 children are being born in Gaza daily. Over two years this is more than the official number killed in the war, so the population has not declined.
https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...
I'm feeding a troll here, but for the benefit of those reading along:
The official numbers are a subset of all deaths: only deaths from direct military action are counted.
In most wars, excepting the shortest conflicts, those deaths are a minority of all deaths.
Even taking the numbers of Save the Children (and I'll let everyone decide whether they're likely an overestimate or an underestimate), it's difficult to think that for every 4 people killed in this slaughter, only 1 person died of hunger, disease, chronic illness, childbirth, age, etc., etc., etc.
Over 2 years.
This is not true. The Gaza Health Ministry published all deaths.
You can’t just speculate and make up your own numbers and then complain that sources are not reliable.
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.
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!
It aggregates many public sources, so much of it is findable, but not all.
ChatGPT and Wikipedia are not primary sources of information.
a primary source is not inherently the accurate one, and collab tools like wikipedia allow for more sources -- this makes the difference.
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.
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.
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...
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.
It probably also costs nothing to make. The CIA maintains dedicated analysts monitoring the world. Have those guys kick out a public report every once in a while sounds like the cheapest possible program.
Crafted by Rajat
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