Wikipedia:Checklists

This essay describes ways to plan and track changes to pages, or perform several tasks, by using a checklist of steps to perform, and then checkmarking "x" each step when completed.

Background
Writing, editing or updating Wikipedia pages and images often requires many related steps to perform a task. WYSIWYG interfaces can be very tedious to use, and many power users quickly switch to text-based editing of pages, as faster to perform the work at hand. When not seeing the changes live on-screen, it can be much faster to keep checklists of intended text changes, to focus on each step to edit, and then re-proofread the final page to checkmark each step as successfully done. That is why computer scientists developed hypertext markup languages, as copy/paste text languages, to allow diff-links between revisions, with new features by a macro scripting language (for templates), and to also allow multi-word search in markup keywords (although most browsers still "find string" rather than "hunt words" in multiple spots). By comparison, point-and-click steps are not obvious in a diff listing. However, a WYSIWYG interface can show the consequences of a change sooner, even though more tedious, such as shifting long lines or images into awkward locations. To overcome the lack of instant feedback, a checklist can be maintained, in a nearby window, as a reminder to verify the changes during an edit-preview, and perhaps add more sub-steps, for further editing, where awkward results had appeared.