Web Scraping with Python: Illustration with CIA World Factbook

In a data science project, almost always the most time consuming and messy part is the data gathering and cleaning. Everyone likes to build a cool deep neural network (or XGboost) model or two and show off one's skills with cool 3D interactive plots. But the models need raw data to start with and they don't come easy and clean. But why gather data or build model anyway? The fundamental motivation is to answer a business or scientific or social question.