The World Factbook,
continued.

For more than five decades The World Factbook was the reference the rest of the world quoted. Compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency and published in the public domain, it gave every country and territory the same treatment: geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and the transnational issues that cut across them. Teachers set homework from it. Journalists cited it mid-deadline. Librarians built guides around it. On 4 February 2026 the CIA took it offline and redirected every one of its URLs to a single farewell page, breaking citations accumulated since 1997.

This site is the continuation. Because The World Factbook was a US Government work in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105, its final edition could be preserved rather than merely remembered, and that is the first half of what you will find here: the complete January 2026 entry for every one of the 254 countries and territories it covered, 32,704 archived data fields in all, kept verbatim and labelled historical wherever it appears. We do not silently edit it. A frozen figure that pretends to be current is worse than no figure at all.

The second half is the part an archive alone cannot give you. Population, GDP, inflation, unemployment, life expectancy, urbanisation, internet adoption, CO2 emissions, military spending, wages and prices are re-fetched from the agencies that publish them — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the UN Population Division, ILOSTAT, Our World in Data — and heads of state and government are tracked from Wikidata, which is the one field that changes whenever a government does. Each of these is a statistic with a vintage, so each is printed with its source and the year it was observed. A number without a year is a guess wearing a suit.

Everything else on the site is built out of those two layers. Country data pages put the live figures at the top and the full archived entry beneath, with a then-and-now table showing exactly what has moved since the Factbook froze. Country rankings order every entity by 22 measures, from population and land area to GDP per capita and armed forces personnel, and each row states whether its value came from a live source or the archive rather than blending the two into an average nobody can audit. Country comparison pages set two nations side by side across the same indicator set — 1,498 pairs have their own permanent page, and any other pair can be assembled on demand — with the frozen Factbook value kept in an adjacent column so you can see the drift yourself.

There is also a repair tool, because the shutdown did more damage to bibliographies than to browsing. Paste any dead cia.gov Factbook URL from any era since 1997 and the resolver identifies which country or field it pointed to — including the old GEC codes, where ch means China and not Switzerland, and gm means Germany and not Gambia — then returns the Wayback Machine snapshot, the live replacement page here, and ready-made APA, MLA and Chicago citations.

A word on what this site will not do, since several World Factbook alternatives now claim the same ground. We do not assert freshness we cannot demonstrate: the date on a page moves only when the data behind it moves, which is why most pages carry an older date than today and why the sitemap says the same thing. We do not present a projection as an observation, or a regional aggregate as a national figure. Where no live source covers an entity — and no source covers Antarctica, the oceans, or a military base area — we say so and show the archive instead of inventing a number. The data is free to reuse, the methodology is written down in full, and every claim on this page is one you can check against the pages themselves.