World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data

> People outside the World Bank are eager for its information. Its newly released data — from economic stats to numbers on landmines — has attracted more than 4.5 million unique views. Indeed, more people come to its Web site looking for data than anything else.

> “I’m astonished by the number of people apparently just waiting for our data to become free,” says Shaida Badiee, director of the bank’s economic development data group. “I had no idea how big a deal this was going to be.”

Free is different. Personally, I'm always surprised when some person or group radically lowers barriers to participation and then express shock when they get run over by a herd of contributors. And this from economists, too! You would think they would be especially sensitive to transaction costs and dead-weight loss! (Even tech types like Eliezer Yudkowsky make this mistake.)

To find more about the data bank use http://data.worldbank.org/

Finally. Even for people working there, or with a paid subscription, using their "treasure chest" was a PITA.

On the other hand, it was the WB's incompetence that motivated me to learn Python and write my first script, to scrape their website and get their data to a more useful and less slow format (mind that I did had a paid subscription at that time)

Maybe this is a response to the IMF hack attacks. If you can't beat 'em, give them what they want to avoid collateral damage to your other resources.