This is a community-wiki question
Worldbuilding Stack Exchange regularly hosts questions asking either how to establish plate tectonics based on an existing planetary map or to judge the suitability of a user's pre-designed tectonics. Consequently, the same basic question has been asked over and over leading to a considerable amount of highly redundant information on this Stack that is no longer easily accessed.
The community-wiki answer, below, exists to bring together the knowledge of so many questions and is intended to be a canonical answer helping worldbuilders to create sensible plate tectonics for their worlds.
Questions asking about plate tectonics that do not indicate that the OP has visited this page should be invited to close their question and look here before asking again. OPs who do not find sufficient information here to solve their problem are asked to clearly explain why this page did not solve the problem. Thank you.
The Rules
There will be only one answer to this question. Please edit that answer with your improvements. All other answers will be deleted.
Please review the contents of the answer before adding your insight to keep duplicated information to a minimum. There's nothing wrong with correcting or adding to what someone else has already written.
If you feel an instruction is intrinsically wrong, please consider carefully what it's trying to convey before you choose to delete it and replace it. If you are not prepared to replace such a rule with something better, please consider leaving it alone until you are ready to do so.
Where possible, the quality of this answer will be improved if you either link back to the Stack Exchange answer you obtained the information from, or link to an outside source that substantiates the idea. This will be a work in process as much of the information in former questions was not provided under the hard-sceince condition and so no citations were included. That doesn't diminish the value of this question, it would simply be improved by the links.
Finally, while it's possible for the answer to become a thousand-page definitive treatise on the subject, that's not the point of worldbuilding. The goal here is to provide practical guidance to solve a practical problem. let's try to stay focused on that.
This question is linked to the site's List of Worldbuilding Resources.
If you have questions about the intent or operation of this question, please post a comment. Once your question has been answered, please delete your comment. Thanks.
