View source for Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Crafting short checklists

{{Vptopic
|topic=Crafting short checklists
|summary=Checklists improve airline safety and reduce mortality in thoracic surgery. They could facilitate excellence on Rosetta Code, but would need to be short.
}}
Two points emerge from an absorbing book by a US heart surgeon, Atul Gawunde, who studied Boeing's checklist development process ("The Checklist Manifesto – how to get things right"):
:# A good checklist can make a surprising amount of difference – raising quality, preventing problems and saving time.
:# Good checklists need to be very short, highly coherent and intelligible, and carefully focused on the absolute essentials.

Rosetta Code's [[Rosetta_Code:Add_a_Task|Add a task]] page is helpful – a whole kitchen-full of varied ingredients for a meal – but if you glance through the Gawunde text, you will soon come to feel that that page, while excellent as a reference, is much too long to be regularly used (or to function effectively) as a pre-flight checklist in itself.

The explanatory text of the [[Rosetta_Code|Rosetta Code language page]], however, is already brief, coherent, well-considered, and readily digested. It captures 3 core goals,  and would provide a very solid and simple framework for designing short and helpful checklists – not only for the framing of tasks, but also for the preparation of solutions, and for the shaping and judgement of editorial suggestions and contributions.

The [[Rosetta_Code|3 core goals of Rosetta Code]] are of course:

:# To '''present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible''',
:# to '''demonstrate how languages are similar and different''', and
:# to '''aid a person with a grounding in one approach to a problem in learning another'''.

A suggestion: I think it could be tremendously helpful, and make consistent excellence of this remarkable learning resource very much easier to achieve, if we were to prepare 3 short pre-flights checklists – one each for:

:- Adding new tasks,
:- Submitting solutions, and
:- Making editorial suggestions and changes

I also think that a very helpful structure for these checklists would be for each to have:

:# Just three brief sections – one for each of Rosetta Code's 3 core goals,
:# and in each section, just 2-4 things to check, or 2-4 questions to ask oneself, as an aid to checking breadth of relevance, depth of insight, and helpfulness to learners.