The Internet is a goldmine of information, yes. In a parallel dimension, it lags in providing authoritative, rigorously accurate knowledge, at no cost to readers. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has changed all that, beginning two decades ago.

The story of how the SEP is run, and how it came to be, shows that it is possible to create a less trashy internet—or at least a less trashy corner of it. A place where actual knowledge is sorted into a neat, separate pile instead of being thrown into the landfill. Where the world can go to learn everything that we know to be true. Something that would make humans a lot smarter than the internet we have today.

From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public.

The online SEP has humble beginnings. Edward Zalta, a philosopher at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information, launched it way back in September 1995, with just two entries.

That makes it positively ancient in internet years. Even Wikipedia is only 14. Sites that have been around 20 years mostly belong to brands that predate the internet—like Bloomberg or MTV—or they’re old sites that just happen to still work, like the classic Space Jam. The SEP is neither pre-internet, nor is it ossified. It now contains nearly 1,500 entries, and changes are made daily. The site gets over a million page views per month—a respectable number, given how many entries there are with titles like Tibetan epistemology and philosophy of language or Peirce’s theory of signs. The American Library Association’s Booklist review called it “comparable in scope, depth and authority” to the biggest philosophy encyclopedias in print, the 10-volume offerings from Routledge and Macmillan—and that was nearly a decade ago.

John Perry, the director of the center, was the one who first suggested a dictionary of philosophical terms. But Zalta had bigger ideas. He and two co-authors later described the challenge in a 2002 paper. That paper is so old that it mentions “CD-ROMs” in the second sentence. But for all the years that have passed, the basic problem remains unsolved.

The requirements are an “impossible trinity”—like having your cake, eating it, and then bringing it to another party.

The three requirements the authors list—”authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date”—are to information what the “impossible trinity” is to economics. You can only ever have one or two at once. It is like having your cake, eating it, and then bringing it to another party.

Yet if the goal is to share with people what is true, it is extremely important for a resource to have all of these things. It must be trusted. It must not leave anything out. And it must reflect the latest state of knowledge. Unfortunately, all of the other current ways of designing an encyclopedia very badly fail to meet at least one of these requirements.

More on SEP here.