CIA the Factbook at 2012 Review and Latest Road Map with latest info 2013 plans.
The country facts in the link listed here are from the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Factbook is published by the CIA to provide facts about countries to policymakers in the United States. It is not covert or secret, and as it says on its permissions page: "The Factbook is in the public domain. Accordingly, it may be copied freely without permission of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)."
It is interesting that the CIA Factbook has been the standard on the Internet for basic country facts for several years. It comes up as #1 on the Google search engine -- which ranks websites by how often they are used across the Internet. The CIA Factbook actually has no online competitor that gives so many facts for all the countries of the world. The CIA Factbook's advantages are many, most importantly being just facts with no commentary and thus not biased toward some point of view. There are lots of pages on the Internet about countries, but few list a lot of countries and most are aimed at specific audiences and have comments that are aimed at their particular audience. The CIA Factbook is used very often as a source when web authors want to just list facts. See, for example, the bottom of the page when you click this link from a university.
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| CIA the Factbook at 2012 Review and Latest Road Map info. |
It is interesting that the CIA Factbook has been the standard on the Internet for basic country facts for several years. It comes up as #1 on the Google search engine -- which ranks websites by how often they are used across the Internet. The CIA Factbook actually has no online competitor that gives so many facts for all the countries of the world. The CIA Factbook's advantages are many, most importantly being just facts with no commentary and thus not biased toward some point of view. There are lots of pages on the Internet about countries, but few list a lot of countries and most are aimed at specific audiences and have comments that are aimed at their particular audience. The CIA Factbook is used very often as a source when web authors want to just list facts. See, for example, the bottom of the page when you click this link from a university.
