Wikipedia talk:Status of the porting of the CIA World Factbook

Ok, the note I made, was to warn users who use old factbook data for FRY/Serbia and Montenegro was not to be confused over who is who.

hoshie

Editions of Factbook

 * According to the Web site:
 * The hardcopy represents information as of Jan. 1st of the year on the cover.
 * Various firsts (well, the two listed since 1970) involving either medium  have come in June, tho the first (hardcover, classified) edition was August of 1962.
 * The article Status of the porting of the CIA World Factbook noted the new year of the on-line edition
 * in December 2002 (2002 edition) and
 * between April and Aug of 2003 (2003 edition)
 * And as of today, in Feb 2004, it is still the 2003 edition that is on line at

(Hence it sounds to me as if each edition of the online version applies until the middle of the following year, tho it gets updated throughout that edition's term.)

... and As of 2003 Links
No big deal, except that at least 6 articles on Cocos (Keeling) Islands use a pipe-hidden as of 2003 link, well-meaningly, in lines reading
 * Information from the CIA World Factbook, 2003 edition.

And we are months away from being able to turn them from 2003-edition references to 2004 ones.

These six are orphans, i think, and may be doomed. But whatever their future, there is no telling how many other as-of-linking pages like them are out there: only the "first" 500 as of 2003-linking pages can be displayed by What links here. Any in addtion to these six are lurking beyond that veil, also awaiting updating, and also acting as part of the crowd standing in the way of updating those even further down the list. In fact, there could be enuf of them to be, at sometime before June, the only thing keeping non-Factbook as of 2003 pages even further on in the list from being considered for updates.

I propose to create a redirect, in the article space, to CIA World Factbook 2003 edition. (I'll put this info at Talk: CIA World Factbook as well.) It will serve an analogous purpose to as of 2003, without coming due 6 months before it can be acted upon. Those who watch this meta should be aware of all this, IMO. --Jerzy 16:09, 2004 Feb 17 (UTC)

crediting source of information
Shouldn't any articles using information from the Factbook contain some sort of source information? There are many articles that do not. Is there an existing template that could be used, similar to say Template:bioguide? older ≠ wiser 15:15, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)


 * Answering my own question, there is Template:factbook which can be added by inserting to an article and which currently consists of the following text: This article incorporates information from The World Factbook, which is in the public domain. older &ne; wiser 15:32, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

Three new entries - Use?
The CIA Factbook has recently updated their site with enries on Akrotiri, Dhekelia, and the European Union. I have already imported the maps of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. However, I am puzzled on the best way to use the new EU data. Any ideas? - Hoshie 08:16, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Military articles
As a part of the import, there is an article listed for each country titled "Military of..." such and such a country. The use of the word "military" in this context is inappropriate, as it is being used only in its American English meaning, and is therefore not clear and is misleading in its content to other readers. Look at the article "military" for the meaning of the term. In short, to US English speakers, "military" refers to all armed services of a nation, whilst to other English speakers, "military" refers primarily to armies only ( and not navies or air forces etc ). Therefore all of the "Military of..." articles could be renamed to a more language neutral title of "Armed Forces of..."

Military and Communication
I disagree with the importation of the titles "Military of" and "Communications of". Both of these words may have meanings that are clear to all speakers of American English....but the English Wikipedia is surely to consider all branches of English and aim for clarity as well as NPOV.

With regards to military, I agree with the sentiment above, this is not a term with clear meaning, whereas something else, e.g. "armed forces" or "defense forces", or something, would be.

However, "Communication" is even more of a problem. The wikipedia article on communication describes what the word means and the different types of communication. What is in the ex-CIA articles is solely information on telecommunication, and therefore either the communication articles all need to be broadened to include information on non telecommunication communication matters, or else the articles are re-named to be "telecommunication of". --JRL 09:17, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Purpose of exercise?
There seem to be a number of articles or sections of articles that consist solely of copied-pasted-and-reformatted text from these CIA factbook summaries. If the originals are already available online at www.cia.gov (as the ones I've looked at seem to be) then I wonder what the point of doing this is. It seems like rather an error-prone waste of time and effort to me when a simple link would suffice, and of course there is the problem of updating them when a new version is produced. (Of course, if the editor adds value to the original, rather than just doing a verbatim copy and paste, then that's an entirely different matter.) Matt 17:31, 10 September 2006 (UTC).

Updating the Articles
Do help avoid confusion and smooth-out the process, if you are updating the articles listed on the page, please do not simply state "updated" or "partly updated", as there are many different versions of the CIA World Factbook, and new versions come out regularly. Please attempt to state "updated (section of article)/(whole article) to YEAR" to avoid confusion. For example: Andora (updated Geography section to 2006) ~ . DanielBC 01:46, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Legal threat in World Factbook copyright notice
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/docs/contributor_copyright.html says (emphasis added by me): The Factbook is in the public domain. Accordingly, it may be copied freely without permission of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). '' The official seal of the CIA, however, may NOT be copied without permission as required by the CIA Act of 1949 (50 U.S.C. section 403m). Misuse of the official seal of the CIA could result in civil and criminal penalties.'' KATMAKROFAN (talk) 01:36, 11 September 2016 (UTC)