Talk:Ahmed Abdul Qader

message: These links to the page numbers within the OARDEC documents may be useful to other contributors.  Geo Swan (talk) 20:26, 6 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Another useful link is the The Guantanamo Docket it is an interactive database provided and updated by the New York Times. The database is searchable and has the Pentagon documents (CSRT and ARB) included. Additional documents and reliable New York Times research regarding the detainees at Guantanamo are also provided. This is the link to the documents and research regarding Ahmed Abdul Qader. IQinn (talk) 04:56, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  rough work 

message: In this edit another contributor reformatted references with the edit summary "Refs: Updated. Code legibility: Code in inline references should also be online"
Please, as a courtesy to other contributors, could we explain complicated or controversial edits on the talk page -- not in our edit summaries?
This assertion is not, so far as I am aware, backed up by policy, or any well-respected wikidocument.  
There is a well-known practical principle -- "If it is not broke, don't fix it."  Personally, I consider the reformatting of reference to be a terrible idea, when it is done solely to comply with someone's esthetic sense.  Policy doesn't state a preference to whether  templates should have one field per line, or all fields on a single logical line.  Personally, I strongly prefer the one field per line form, because  templates can be broken.  They can be broken by unbalanced brackets and unbalanced braces.  Personally, I find debugging the individual fields in a template much easier, if each field is on its own line.  
So, the unnecessary rewriting of metadata, like  templates, for esthetic reasons, is a terribly bad idea, because errors can be introduced during the rewriting.
In addition, this kind of rewriting very strongly erodes the utility of the history mechanism.  I have been contributing to the wikipedia since 2004, and routinely go back to articles I last edited years previously.  I do this when i come across new information, new references, that require an update.  Well, of course, before I make that update, I should use the revision control system to make sure that new information has not already been incorporated.
This should be easy, since we have a history mechanism, which can show how the article has been changed.  Sadly, this process is routinely made more difficult, by well-meaning, by highly advised contributors, who make purely esthetic changes to article's metadata.  By doing so they confuse the history mechanism, so it lights up like a christmass tree.  Sometimes it will look like every single word of the article was changed -- forcing me to step through dozens of individual revisions, one at a time.  
Wow.  It can be an infuriating waste of time.  Sometimes genuine changes have been made to the article's editorial content -- what it actually says.  But more than half the time I will find that while multiple contributors made dozens of edits, all of those edits were to the article's meta-data, and none of those other contributors made any efforts to help keep the article up to date.
I have made thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of edits to  templates someone else wrote.  I make the effort to resist the temptation to rewrite references, when I populate missing fields, to keep it in the form where all fields are on a single line, if that is the way I found it.  I make this effort so my edits don't erode the utility of diffs for other people.
I think I should be able to ocount on other contributors to make the effort to not erode the utility of diffs for me.  Geo Swan (talk) 03:43, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  As a courtesy to other contributors could we explain complicated or controversial edits on the talk page -- not in our edit summaries? 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 4 external links on Ahmed Abdul Qader. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070930184542/http://cageprisoners.com/articles.php?aid=3838 to http://cageprisoners.com/articles.php?aid=3838
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2008/12/16%20detainees%20wittes/1216_detainees_wittes.pdf
*Corrected formatting/usage for https://www.rt.com/usa/news/gitmo-prisoners-might-see-the-cold-sea/
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070929123416/http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3902 to http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3902
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 09:22, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified