Looking for a shared checklist/todo list thingdoo.

You could use listchallenges plus MechanicalTurk to populate it relatively inexpensively...

If I were doing this with fairly web-savvy users I'd be inclined to do it with a wiki, creating the list as a template - the sort of thing at the top of most Wikipedia pages that generates a sidebar from a little blob of code with slots to fill in information. I like http://jamwiki.org but there are multitudes. I haven't looked recently but some wiki software may be able to present the template as a web form that the user fills in, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia's hosted sites appear to be able to, as a more straightforward interface.

Tables on Wikia pages can also be coded to be sortable. However, I'm not sure the first Need is attainable through Wikia. As far as I'm aware, a Wikia page is either locked so only users with certain rights can edit it, or unlocked so anyone can—the notion of a checklist that's user-checkable but not user-editable on a Wikia page is not one that I can envision. Maybe I've missed too many Wikia software updates to know of any such functionality.

I'm not sure that https://trello.com/ does exactly what you want, but it's free and might be worth a look.

As far as I'm aware, a Wikia page is either locked so only users with certain rights can edit it, or unlocked so anyone can—the notion of a checklist that's user-checkable but not user-editable on a Wikia page is not one that I can envision. The template that forms the list would be locked, the pages that contain instances of it would not be. Not all wiki software allows templates but MediaWiki/Wikipedia/Wikia and JAMWiki do. For example, if you look at this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFS_Alert you can edit it and fill in values in the copy of the "infobox settlement" template at the top. But if you go to the actual template's page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_settlement It's protected, so unless you're logged in and a member of the correct user groups all you can do is "view source", not edit it. Certainly, someone with nefarious purposes could delete the template and instead cram in tables and text to imitate the checklist... but they could also just fill in checkboxes they haven't achieved yet anyways in any system that worked as described in the OP, so I don't know if that would really be a problem.

I hadn't really thought about a wiki format. I would be fine doing this in a wiki template somewhere if I knew I could do the following things - protect a template as indicated above - create a checklist with boxes that held their checked/unchecked state between sessions for different users Is this a thing that is actually doable and not just a thing the tools could do? I'll be googling for examples but if anyone has one I'd love a link to it. Thanks for your suggestions so far.

So you're just looking for one list, made by you, once? No need to scale this? No users sharing lists? Just kindof a fun one off, single serving project? I don't know of any existing plugin/services like this, but I think the development of this could be very simple. The kind you could beg of a friend/bribe with cookies. I am no JS master, just a designer/developer, but worked on a project recently that used JS to create a user profile, stored locally on a cookie, that stored form (i.e. checkboxes) selections. We did this specifically to avoid having users register an account. Also we were talking about 6 values, not 600. It might begin to be stupid at that scale. Obviously, this wouldn't work browser to browser, so if you're looking to have mobile support you'll need a less hacky method. Also, your user can't erase cookies frequently, and needs to accept cookies. And no sharing of lists, generating a unique user URL, etc. Super bare bones. So, I see the workflow going as such: Get your csv into HTML. Give each record an <input> with a type="checkbox" and an ID with a sequential ID. GREP might work. Have your JS return each value that is true to your cookie based profile. You could do this on each click for seamless use, but again, this might be stupid at a large scale. On each page load, check your cookie, and populate your form with those values. Bobs your uncle. You can use some jquery to do some basic math on your DOM to tally/show progress. Heck, you could use jquery and css to have badges become "unlocked" when they hit 5%, 25%, etc. Lots of cool css stuff is coming to mind, but again, I'm a designer first, developer second.

With a plain, out-of-the box wiki that supports templates you can easily get it working as it does at the links I http://ask.metafilter.com/252998/Looking-for-a-shared-checklist-todo-list-thingdoo#3675216, so that when the user is editing it what they're doing is just typing an "x" into the field to check it in (or anything else; basically you'd write the template so that if it's blank, it's unchecked, but entering any value at all makes it checked) but when the page is being viewed the template either displays "☐" or "☒" so it looks like a list of checkboxes. If you want it to actually work like the checkboxes in a standard web form when the user is editing it, so that they just click on the box to fill it in, the way I'm aware of doing that is with the http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms for a MediaWiki-based site: if you create a form field with a http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Type_Boolean value it automatically shows up as a checkbox, according to the documentation. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms/Hosting lists the hosts that allow you to install that extension. However, the Semantic Forms extension has been around for almost a decade now, so at this point other wiki software may support that sort of functionality too; I haven't researched that recently.

Thanks XMLicious. Having users go into a wiki editor is a non-starter, but me messing with Semantic Forms might be okay.