Board Thread:Policies/@comment-1038387-20180506105530/@comment-3361105-20180510031301

A little more on this subject, based on some discussion between admins:

This should not be an opportunity to raze the wiki of galleries.

For the sake of expediency, I'm going to say "character" and mean any kind of image subject.

The appropriate approach should be:
 * first decide whether there are enough good images of a given character to warrant a gallery before creating one.
 * We should turn off redlinking to galleries in templates, so as not to encourage the creation of galleries for the sake of getting rid of a red link.
 * The criteria for deleting galleries shouldn't be "is this a prominent character", it should be "are there any good images of this character?" and if there is only one or two images, and neither is "gallery" worthy, then we should delete the gallery (or just not make one).
 * Image Categories and Character pages can and do serve as places where images of minor characters are showcased, if not a gallery.
 * G'nort, for example, is a secondary character, but has a pretty solid image, worthy of a gallery, right here. (Though, arguably, it is the only one we have, at the moment).
 * We shouldn't put SEO before being an encyclopedia. While SEO is important, if it comes at the cost of being able to be encyclopedic, then, maybe we can do without the SEO there. (We are still one of Fandom's biggest and most visited wikis, despite our methods).
 * Despite claims that "nobody visits gallery pages" from Fandom, we have anecdotal statements from many creators who say they actually visit our gallery pages to get drawing references for obscure characters. I know cosplayers who do this too. The problem is that only people who know of the site and how to navigate the site are able to use galleries effectively, meanwhile our gallery SEO is so poor that no one can find them with google.
 * The idea of galleries was to showcase different artists' takes on a character, and their different costumes, and changes through the years. That was certainly the approach on the galleries we have for the Big 7, and other majors like Catwoman. The question is then, how many images do we need in a gallery to be able to carry on that ideology - at a maximum, not a minimum.