World Factbook

Well I'm off on a history/geography kick lately, and it shows no signs of abating, thankfully! Today I discovered that the CIA had recently (April 5th, but I don't check their site frequently) updated their World Factbook with its 2006 edition. I'm not sure when I first came across this wonderful resource, but it might have been as far back as 2000 when I was just starting college.

The factbook is excellent. Whatever you might think of the CIA regarding their intelligence gathering abilities or tendency to leak information this is still something good that they do. From what I understand the World Factbook was originally produced for government employees to provide a simple one-stop shopping experience for information about countries around the globe. You won't find much exposition here, but many, many detailed statistics from each and every country around the world.

Best of all the information is electronic so it can be updated several times a year without the expense of a new printing. I've been downloading each new version as it is released for several years now--I actually keep them all on my hard drive so that I can compare them if I want to (somewhat like my hobby of collecting old atlases).

Since this information is produced by a government agency it is not under copywright restrictions. Thus if you cruise through Wikipedia much you may notice that many of the information in country profiles there comes from the World Factbook.

Here is a sample from the article on Guernsey, one of the channel islands belonging to Great Britain. Small entries like this that deserve to be separate from the main country but aren't actually independent are often included in the factbook. I've only included some isolated selections from the entire page.

Background:
The island of Guernsey and the other Channel Islands represent the last remnants of the medieval Dukedom of Normandy, which held sway in both France and England. The islands were the only British soil occupied by German troops in World War II. Guernsey is a British crown dependency, but is not part of the UK.

Population:
65,409 (July 2006 est.)

Age Structure:
0-14 years: 15% (male 4,998/female 4,842)
15-64 years: 67.1% (male 21,752/female 22,170)
65 years and over: 17.8% (male 4,926/female 6,721) (2006 est.)

You can learn what drives the economies of various nations, how many television stations they have, what religions/languages are prevalent, how big their militaries could be, and many other fun things. It was from this publication that I first learned that there is officially now a fifth ocean. The Southern Ocean surrounds Antartica out to 60 degrees south latitude.

~Matt