Wikipedia:Checklists
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
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[edit]
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.