Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-23932365-20141129182929/@comment-1038387-20141130135650

I'm with Lady L and Emerson. Properly categorizing images is a good way to clean up duplicates, and it has encyclopedic value too. Categorizing allows you to organize images based on source or artist.

Too many sites do not source their images, or credit the artist. Wiki software offers the opportunity to do so, and it's a service to the reader (and I think it should be a prerequisite for citing fair use, IMO). Too often I go to a wiki on a tv series, read up, see an image, and when I wonder, "what episode is this from, I want to check it out", or "who drew this, I like this art"... it has no information and a gibberish filename.

On the DC wiki, we used an image template. If no source is filled out, it automatically adds it to a category "Image Source Needed". I actually went through thousands and thousands of images, properly sourcing all of them and deleting or replacing ones I couldn't source. Got rid of a lot of fanart too that way. Added bonus: image sourcing is something our main "competitors" off-wiki don't offer.

We now have a strict image policy. If you upload an image with a bad filename and don't add a filled out template, you get a warning and it gets deleted. If you do it 3-5 times without responding on your message wall (dependent on our patience), you get a short block (dependent on how often you're active).

Edit: I should add that on DC, we do a lot with categories, as making manual lists of artists credits or appearances is tedious and impossible to keep up-to-date. So using it for images as well is a no-brainer.