So, it seems (if I interpret Jimbo's mail on wikitech and the discussion here correctly) that most of us would like *some kind* of category scheme in wikipedia. I do, too! But, we seem to differ on the details (shocked silence!).
So far, I saw three concepts: 1. Simple categories like "Person", "Event", etc.; about a dozen total. 2. Categories and subcategories, like "Science/Biology/Biochemistry/Proteomics", which can be "scaled down" to #1 as well ("Humankind/Person" or something) 3. Complex object structures with machine-readable meta-knowledge encoded into the articles, which would allow for quite complex queries/summaries, like "biologists born after 1860".
Pros: 1. Easy to edit (the wiki way!) 2. Still easy to edit, but making wikipedia browseable by category, fine-tune Recent Changes, etc. 3. Strong improvement in search functions, meta-knowledge available for data-mining.
Cons: 1. Not much of a help... 2. We'd need to agree on a category scheme, and maintenance might get a *little* complicated. 3. Quite complex to edit (e.g., "<category type='person' occupation='biologist' birth_month='5' birth_day='24' birth_year='1874' birth_place='London' death_month=.....>")
For a wikipedia I'd have to write myself, I'd choose #3, but with respect to the wiki way, #2 seems more likely to achieve consensus (if there is such a thing;-)
Magnus