[zzleeper]

Finally. Even for people working there, or with a paid subscription, using their "treasure chest" was a PITA.

On the other hand, it was the WB's incompetence that motivated me to learn Python and write my first script, to scrape their website and get their data to a more useful and less slow format (mind that I did had a paid subscription at that time)

[bmelton]

WorldBank prides itself on carrying almost no internal IT staff, and outsource the bulk of their rather large IT infrastructure.

In my opinion, this leads to a disconnect in that the people who would be exposing the data via APIs likely don't have the understanding of how the data might be processed as it isn't a part of their business function.

Long-term IT contracts typically bridge that gap eventually, which I am only guessing is how they're able to expose the data effectively now, if in fact they can.