Wikipedia: CIA World Factbook/Talk

The CIA World Fact Book has maps that are apparently public domain. Should we use these on Wikipedia as well as the text? We could put these on the Wikipedia server without too much trouble and load them from there. - TS

I wouldn't mind at all; the only reason I didn't post them already was that some of them are rather large; they go from just under 40k for some of the island countries to 238k for Indonesia and 279k for the world map. Even the small flags shown at the top of each country's main page are around 14k. Those are all .jpgs; I haven't yet tried saving them in different formats or at different compressions. But I do think it would be valuable to have them online.

JPG is a totally inappropriate format for these; they would be of much higher quality and similar size as PNGs, but converting them from their present web form won't work: they'll just become bigger with the same low quality they have now. Once they've been though the JPG lossy conversion there's no way to get the lost data back. They need to be rescanned from a paper copy and re-encoded as PNG. I don't have a copy of the paper myself, nor do I know what it would cost, but I could do the scanning work if I got my hands on one. --Lee Daniel Crocker

Actually the ones on the CIA site now look fine, I think. Take a look to see if you agree; maybe they can just be converted to PNG and used as-is. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/indexgeo.html

Nope, they are still JPG and they look awful. Even the icons on the page are JPG--those webmasters really don't have a clue. Converting them to PNG from those JPGs will just make them even worse. They really need to be rescanned from a paper edition into PNG originals which will be clear and sharp and probably compress even better than the JPGs on the CIA's site. --LDC

The CIA World Factbook contains uses non-standard country codes and currency codes. I think we should use the ISO standard ones, which are most common on the internet anyway. Thus the FIPS codes in the World factbook entries should be converted to ISO standard codes when wikifying the article. -- Simon J Kissane

I don't know what you mean. Can you give an example?

Please see article FIPS two-letter country codes. For example, BO maps to different countries in FIPS and ISO 3166 codings. -- The Anome