CIA Erased the World Factbook with No Warning

There are very few other sources, barring Wikipedia which isn’t a primary source, that maintain a regularly updated “fact sheet” about various countries.

It was also an authoritative source for many discussions especially if you were having the conversation within the U.S. or a friendly allied country.

It was well maintained and I never came across any errors despite having used it heavily.

Finally it is about as consistent as possible. So, for example, if I go to Wikipedia for a certain piece of information, such as population, etc. how Wikipedia defines the population or even the boundaries of certain nations (and therefore the population) wouldn’t necessarily be consistent across countries.

With this it would usually be consistent. You may disagree with the definitions but it would largely be consistent or at the very least it would be useful because this is how the CIA largely defined it, so you still have a consistent authority if not methodology.

This place existed a long time before you created your account an hour ago.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=factbook