Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-23932365-20141129182929/@comment-452-20141130132550

As a user on a wiki with a lot of images, I don't give a rat's eye about image categories, and given the lack of interest in the discussion I started on that wiki regarding the categorisation of images: neither does anyone else.

When I first joined the wiki, a Wikia Staff dropped by and offered to mass-categorise the existing images, I thought this would also include auto-categorising future images but it didn't, and when I asked about what would happen with future images, I didn't receive a reply.

Now, I know enough to do it myself, and could apply a category or 5 to each image, but I'm not sure whether it would be worth it, which is why I put up a few ideas on a talk page. I've personally never navigated images via category, and if anyone else on the wiki has, they've never mentioned it.
 * For anyone interested, one of my ideas was to auto-categorise images by character by matching the character name in filenames. We've long been using a "make filenames as descriptive as possible including naming everything in it" policy, which would have made it pretty easy.

If you did create a policy regarding it, the problem, as always, would be enforcing it. What would you do? None of those options really appeal to me, and the first two will likely only result in fewer people uploading images. I've had a hard enough time enforcing the "descriptive filenames" policy - it's handled through mediawiki:titleblacklist, but most people who used non-descriptive filenames before the blacklist are simply not uploading anything now.
 * Delete images without a category?
 * Block uploaders who don't add a category?
 * Neither, and just do all the work yourself?

I'm all for preventing duplicates, I've deleted hundreds of them - but I don't understand how categories can help me detect duplicates any more than:
 * 1) Add images to appropriate articles
 * 2) Check if there is a similar existing image in an appropriate article before adding it and delete one of them.
 * 3) Use a coherent order in all galleries so that any duplicates would naturally group together