[regenschutz]

It was updated weekly. Constantly writing and maintaining so much information is almost certainly very expensive. Coupled with the fact that you have to be very careful before releasing each edit to make sure that no accidental personal beliefs or theories slip by (as that would be a diplomatic catastrophe), I reckon the cost of maintaining the thing could be very high.

I would wager that they're still going to maintain their own version of the World Factbook, and just simply not share it. This would allow them to cut out the very costly review step that I talked about.

Now whether that's a good decision or not is a completely different question.

[RajT88]

Your definition of "very high" costs likely don't align with what you think of when you think of "very high" government spending. NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.4% of the total government budget.

Wikimedia foundation's operating budget is 207 million a year - a drop in the ocean of federal budgets, if Factbook was similar.

[SECProto]

> NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.04% of the total government budget.

I'm sorry, I think you have a math or data error here. The US government budget for 2025 was not $62.5 trillion dollars.

[Retric]

Yea, they where off by a factor of 10, so 0.4%.

[RajT88]

Now fixed. Point still stands!

[pesus]

If it was about the cost of updating it, they wouldn't need to remove the archived versions.

[supjeff]

yeah, where is the CIA going to find the money to pay a few editors?

I think you touched on the real reason: objective facts are anti-trump, woke leftist propaganda