I'm just thinking about ways to help users in producing more complete, consistent and useful sets of keywords; bearing in mind that good keywords will often not be words actually used in the article, or will be words too common to be included in a software generated word-dex, or words used in an idiosyncratic fashion. For example I sometimes index articles about anti-americanism and the like with the keyword "5" (for "fifth column"). Say I was posting an article about American communists in the "McCarthy" era. If I supplied the keyword "communists," simply from that, and/or from examining the article, and/or examing keywords commonly associated with "communists," the software can ask if I also want to included (any of) the keywords "5," "treason," "CPUSA," "McCarthy," "Espionage," etc.
Running articles and user supplied keywords through this software analysis, and providing an opportunity to add/review keywords from a software generated list would (it seems to me) tend to produce more consistent keyword indexing. Users posting articles would get a sense, and a list, of "consenses" keywords used by other freepers in posting similar articles.
If you do that, though, you're adding a keyword-search to the posting process, such that it'll have to search through the index to match the current user-supplied keywords with other user-supplied keywords in other articles, and then draw out associated keywords that are not included in the current submission, in order to present them to you as possibilities. You could do that, but I'd want to know more about how often the search function we're already proposing would be used, how often articles are posted - and hence, how often the index search would be used in that context - and what kind of loads we're talking about for the server for all these new search functions. It's easy enough to imagine these things, especially when you have unlimited imaginary hardware to run it on, and someone else to sit down and do the actual coding ;)
'Course it also might consume too much overhead, or slow down JohnHuang2 and kattracks too much.
BTW, John, how about making more of the statistics (that normally only moderators can see) visible on user pages? It would be fun to see how many articles some of our champions, like John and kattracks, really have posted, or how many replies champion chatters like Lazamataz have posted (without reading the article).