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Image galleries on Wikipedia, when used properly, can be a good way to illustrate a subject to readers. However, the use of galleries comes with several problems that must be considered:
- Left alone, galleries tend to grow over time. Good faith editors will often see a gallery, and decide that they have the perfect image to add. Repeat this enough times with enough editors, and you end up with something like this or even this. Massive galleries make articles difficult to navigate, massively inflate the size of articles (making them slow for readers with slower internet connections), and violate Wikipedia policy (specifically, WP:NOTGALLERY, which states, "Wikipedia is neither a mirror nor a repository of links, images, or media files.").
- Galleries move most or all images to one place in the article, devoid of context. A good Wikipedia article will use images to supplement and enhance the prose. For instance, the article Gun has a number of images of historical guns, advancing in technology as the article's prose advances through time. If these images were all thrown into a gallery at the end of the article, this context would be lost.
- Galleries are often used to provide undue weight to one aspect of a topic. This is something commonly done by enthusiasts for a subject, for instance, adding galleries depicting every single paint scheme a railroad company has ever used. Per Wikipedia:UNDUE, articles must provide balanced coverage and avoid giving too much focus to small parts of a subject. Giant galleries of paint schemes, vehicles, or other niche parts of topics are a violation of UNDUE and actively make articles worse.