Currently we have the future to create card links to magic card using the following format[mtg: Card name] and this should be used instead of creating a link to the gatherer yourself, but should we edit all the gatherer links in older posts to links using the current mtg: format.
I know this will take a lot of time to edit, but I am sure some people will help me with it.
It's okay to do mass editing projects as long as you do it carefully:
I think this seems like a small but reasonable improvement, if done carefully. There are a couple concerns:
Outside of those corner cases, I don't think old gatherer links have broken in general, but replacing them with [mtg:...] links does prevent breakage in the future. It also standardizes the way the links are presented.
So I'd say go for it if you want, with the above things in mind. The slow rate means that organizing help isn't exactly necessary, but encouraging people to change links if they're already editing something else seems good. Or if it all seems like too much trouble at that point, just forget about mass editing and only edit the posts you come across otherwise.
No, you shouldn't edit all the older posts that are using different links to the cards as that is a trivial edit and would unnecessarily bump the post to the front page.
If you run across a link during normal use of the site I don't see a problem with editing the post to correct the link. But to mass edit posts that have working links just to change the format and to flood the front page with old posts doesn't make sense.
You need to remember that any edit to a post, even to add a single character bumps it to the front page which for older posts isn't really needed.
[mtg] to save time while posting, not to create more work after the fact.Look at the difference between [mtg] and "hard-coded" Gatherer URLs.
From a reader-facing perspective, they're almost always identical. Click a link, see a card.
[mtg] has introduced some quirk. E.g. [mtg:Sun Titan] sending you to a disambiguation page.[mtg] is, chiefly, a convenience for writing questions and answers. It reduces workload and errors when you're linking to 20 different cards in a single post. If someone's already done that work, however, and it's free of errors, then going back in and changing it doesn't save any work retroactively.
What about "future-proofing?"
You're not actually saying any work. If the old links ever break, it's not hard to do the work then: automate a search to find all Gatherer URLs, and we still have the card names in the link text to help us update them. Planning for how to avoid information loss now (while we have all the information) is important; doing more than that is wasted effort since you don't know exactly what form that possible future breakage will take.
As it stands right now, [mtg] links are actually less stable: WotC can break a few of them at a time by introducing a new set. (See the [mtg:Sun Titan] problem, above.) So you're actually increasing the possibility that a perfectly-formed answer will get more cruft because of future sets.
In summary, [mtg] is actually a little bit less stable and reliable than "hard-coded" Gatherer URLs, but we accept that because it saves tons of time and effort when writing answers.
As a mass editing project, this is either value-neutral or strictly value-negative: you actually risk introducing a lot of new errors and degraded functionality unless you very carefully check all your links and include manual workarounds for the ones you break.
