Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-23932365-20141129182929/@comment-3026053-20141130135739

There is a long standing and well-working image policy on the Avatar Wiki that makes categorizing easy to use for everyone. As opposed to use galleries on a pages, which I personally find horrifyingly ugly (though I am more than aware that's just a personal aversion and I wouldn't dare make a claim that it's a general thing), we include an "image gallery" link at the bottom of the infobox of characters and episodes. That way, every viewer can click it and end up with all the images that show that particular character or all the images taking during that particular episode. The categorization of those images makes that possible.

Maintaining the policy is even made more easy when one of our administrators created "shortcut editing buttons", so just by pressing the button, the licensing format appears, which is user-friendly and easy to fill in. It's also extremely easy for an administrator (or any other knowledgeable user) to keep track of these things and correct them/add the licensing themselves if necessary. A lack of a category should never be a reason to block a user or delete the image, since it's so easy to add yourself if its forgotten. Yes, it's a change that would take a community a little while to get used to, but from a maintenance point of view, it's a very good change to make.

Categories help prevent duplicates, because over time, people get more and more used to the fact that they can check just one category where all the images about their intended subject are grouped, as opposed to having to dig through hundreds and sometimes even thousands of images just to see whether or not a usable image for them is already there. It's much more appealing to turn to one category then, especially when it's a character or an episode category.

Having image categories also bypasses the need to use/show every image a certain character appears in on that character's page, which can come across as very messy.