About WorldFactbooks
Why this exists
For decades, "look it up in the Factbook" was the answer to any country question. On February 4, 2026 the CIA stopped publishing The World Factbook and every one of its pages went dark. Mirrors appeared quickly, but they share a flaw: they froze the January 2026 data forever. Populations, economies, and governments moved on; frozen mirrors did not. Within months their headline figures were measurably wrong.
WorldFactbooks takes the other path. We preserve the complete final Factbook edition as labeled historical reference, and we keep the fast-moving numbers current from primary sources: World Bank, IMF, UN Population Division, Wikidata, and ILOSTAT. Every figure shows its source and the year it was observed, and we re-fetch those sources and rebuild rather than working to a published timetable. The dates on this site are the honest record of that: each page's updated stamp moves only when its data actually moved, so you can see for yourself how current any given profile is instead of taking a promise on faith.
What is here
- 261 profiles carrying the full Factbook archive, most with live data layered on top
- 22 ranked tables that refresh as sources publish, each row marked live, archive or derived
- 1,498 country-vs-country comparison pages
- A citation resolver for the millions of dead cia.gov Factbook links
What this is not
We are an independent publisher with no affiliation to, or endorsement from, the Central Intelligence Agency or the United States Government. The historical Factbook text we host is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). We are also not a primary source: our live figures come from the institutions named on the sources page, and serious research should cite those institutions directly. What we add is currency, context, and continuity.
Who runs it
WorldFactbooks is an independently run project, not an institution, and it is not big enough to hide behind a masthead. Almost everything you see is produced by an automated pipeline rather than by editors: sources are fetched, gated, joined and published on a schedule, with no human approving each change. We would rather you judged that pipeline than took our word for it, so it is documented step by step, gate by gate, on the methodology page, and every dataset it draws on is named with its license on the sources page.
Corrections and questions reach us through the contact page. We fix what we can verify against a primary source, and the fix appears here on the next refresh that runs after it lands.