Wikipedia talk:The CIA World Factbook

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm responsible for this proposal. I hope I didn't make any terrible mistakes in creating the project page. It's something that's irked me for a while, and I think Wikipedia would be much improved if the proposal would be discussed, improved itself, and adopted. I'm perfectly willing to do some of the coal-face work and go through all the country articles once there appears to be consensus.

I, for one, support the policy. NPOV statements in the economic assessment of countries, in particular, abound, and some of them are clearly inacceptable for Wikipedia.

RandomP 05:14, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Comment: Population data of many less developed countries is overestimated by the CIA Factbook. See Talk:List of countries by population/Archive 1. Polaron | Talk 14:04, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I strongly suggest you guys read https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/faqs.html . If you guys still have problems with the CIA Factbook, you are more than welcome to email them (email address provided on given site). Hope that'll erase some doubts and/or clear up some issues.--Ryz05 _t 00:11, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the link! I do not see anything there that pertains to the NPOV issues, and my doubts and issues with quoting the CIA world factbook as facts remain. I'll add a couple of examples below, to go into a rationale section depending on how discussion about this goes. RandomP 03:04, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Oppose While I agree that some details contained in some of the overview sections have a biased POV, I believe that the World Factbook is one of the most respected sources available for use. As such, I don't support a policy limiting its use. Rather, while it's clumsy and time consuming, I'd prefer to leave it to be talked out whenever misuse of the World Factbook comes about. MikeNM 14:05, 16 June 2006 (UTC)