Filing this since subbu wanted to take a closer look ("Yes, VE/Parsoid shouldn't be making dirty diffs -- and these kind of dirty diffs is an exception rather than the rule. This is a bug."):
<<VE seems to make unnecessary changes. I wouldn't mind so much if it always helped to maintain the layout of invisible elements, but normally it just screws them (like infoboxes, or position of templates), without any effect on the rendered page but with a less easily readable wikitext editing window.
What I notice now though are totally unnecessary and hard to explain changes to ref names. For some reason, VE decides that all ref names need to be in quotes, which is not true at all and doesn't help one bit. It also decides that between the final quote and the forward slash, there needs to be a space. All this has no effect on the rendered page, and doesn't make the wikitext page any easier (or harder) to read, so why does VE bother doing this, which only helps to make diffs a lot longer.
Take a look at e.g. [10]: can you easily see if any significant change has been made, and what that may be?
First difference; <ref name="globsec-arjun"/> becomes
<ref name="globsec-arjun" /> Further: <ref name=nomorearjuns> becomes <ref name="nomorearjuns">
and so on. I have not found the actual significant difference between the old and new version. What is the purpose and benefit of this? If VE would always make the "invisible" layout clearer and better, fine, but VE doesn't care one bit about wikitext layout, so I don't get this useless editing. Fram (talk) 09:27, 7 October 2013 (UTC)>>
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Severity: normal