Sometimes pictures (tabulars, equations, etc.) are not described properly in the text. (=cannot directly be refered to, therefore...)
It is sometimes hard to figure out which picture is meant.

Reader of Wikipedia would benefit, because the picture which is described is named unambiguously.

Editors of Wikipedia will have an easy to use tool to address a certain picture in the text.

How is this problem being addressed now?

Sometimes the pictures are numbered by the editors.

This is inconvenient, when there are a lot of pictures in one article, and more pictures are added somewhere in the middle of the article.

What are the proposed solutions?

Each picture, which should get a number, is marked with a label-tag.

One can now address the picture by addressing to the label-tag.

This is similar to the references numbering in wikipedia and the picture numbering in latex.

--Boehm (talk) 23:39, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

This card tracks a proposal from the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey

This proposal received 13 support votes, and was ranked #56 out of 107 proposals. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Multimedia#Automatic_numbering_of_pictures