Taylor Hale was in the middle of teaching a Western geography lesson on Wednesday afternoon when his sixth-grade students informed him that the online reference they usually consulted was gone. He’d instructed them to compare the gross domestic products of Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and so they turned to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. But instead of finding the usual index of countries, they hit a blue webpage announcing that the Factbook was no more.
After decades of serving as a reliable, authoritative public repository of basic information about countries, their economies, and their people, The World Factbook disappeared from the internet on February 4 with no advance notice. Teachers, students, librarians, researchers, and curious citizens in general were abruptly cut off from a reference they had taken for granted.
“The CIA Factbook is not bulletproof perfect, but it’s way better than a lot of other sources out there and it’s free,” Hale, a social studies teacher in Oklahoma City, said. “It was always there, and now it’s not.”
Before this week, teachers like Hale routinely directed their students to The World Factbook for school assignments, international travelers used it to assess security risks and vaccine recommendations, and journalists relied on its data to add context to their reporting.
John Devine, the government information research specialist for the Boston Public Library, recalled a patron who was particularly curious about population statistics. Over the years, the city’s librarians found that The World Factbook was “the singular best source for this” — the CIA updated its numbers annually, and no other entity offered data that was as accurate year after year.
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