Every now and I come across something especially cool (read: nerdy) on the internet. Not necessarily something major, influential, or newsworthy, but cool nonetheless. For these precious moments of geekdom, I give you nerd alert!

I begin with this nerd alert’s namesake: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The SEP is a free, online collection of peer reviewed articles on philosophy. Their publishing model is as stringent as any encyclopedia’s or journal’s (plus it’s Stanford), so there’s no question of quality. This is all well and good, but it’s not what I’m geeking out over. I have known about the SEP for awhile, but just noticed that they have static, quarterly archives so you can cite an article without worrying about it changing. How cool is that!

Of course, the idea of an open online repository of philosophy is pretty cool on its own. Wikipedia is certainly more extensive, but the SEP (and the more comprehensive Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is absolutely more informative and scholarly. Plus, the information from the SEP is a lot more trustworthy (for those looking to be certain of their sources).

Other similar collections exist for other topics (Internet Medieval Handbook anyone?), but how many? Someone needs to find them all and create a huge, searchable directory. Hmm….