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The list you provided seems huge for a single Q/A. I think you're better off breaking them up, and linking to each other in the answers. The theory behind text encoding can be decoupled from Python, as it's relevant to the whole world of programming. If you already know about text encoding, and how it works, but you're just looking for how to use it, perhaps because you forgot, or because you're coming from a different language, it's unnecessary to scroll through a long description of what it is, first.

> What are UnicodeEncodeError and UnicodeDecodeError? What do they mean; what causes them; and how do I resolve them?

This could be a debugging Q/A for text encoding in Python.

> How do I specify an encoding...
>
> - for converting bytes to a string or vice-versa?
> - for reading and writing files?
> - when working with web libraries such as Requests, BeautifulSoup etc.?
> - when using a library to parse formats like CSV, JSON etc.?

These don't belong in one and the same Q/A. Have a separate Q/A for each one of them. You can give a broad overview of strings vs blobs, though, in an explanation specific to Python.

> What is the codecs standard library module for, and how does it relate to text encoding? 

Probably works best as a separate Q/A.

> - Historical: in Python 2.x, why can attempts to decode cause UnicodeEncodeError, and vice-versa?
> - Historical / migration: how should I understand the type names bytes, str and unicode in 2.x vs 3.x?
> - Historical: What was basestring in 2.x and why was it needed?
> - Historical / migration: why did 2.x treat those types the way it did, and why does 3.x treat them differently? Why shouldn't I try to emulate the old approaches in new code?

These can either be separate Q/As, tagged accordingly, or coupled together in a "text encoding in Python 2 vs Python 3" Q/A.