Comment by shevy-java

Hmm. It's kind of weird, because I think I actually used it in the 1990s, probably shortly before Wikipedia emerged. Ever since Wikipedia, I don't think I used the CIA world Factbook much at all, so in a way I guess this partly explains why the website is now defunct. But I am a tiny bit sad that it is gone, if only for a piece of nostalgia from the 1990s era. I think we need to be careful - yes, wikipedia has that information, but we kind of lose websites here. That is a potential danger, because we end up with more and more of a monopoly which is rarely good (ok, wikipedia may be an exception but it also has intrinsic quality issues; it is still excellent in many ways but not perfect, and we may get tunnel vision the more websites vanish - just look at the AI slop autogenerated "content" or "affiliate" links you see in a google search, if anyone is still using that).