Should I fix my 175 posts that use \newcommand without \begingroup?

Question

A little over 4 years go I discovered that MathJax supports the $\LaTeX$ command \newcommand, and started to use it in my own answers and questions: this makes certain repetitive things so much easier to write.

In the meantime I've done this in 171 answers, 4 questions, and 11 comments.

(As a side note, currently I'm mostly using these for making it easy to write proofs and calculations in a 'calculational style'; see, e.g., EWD1300. A gist which I use as a template is here.)

However, I've recently discovered that \newcommand is not without its disadvantages: its scope is the rest of the math.se page on which it occurs. This means that my posts could be affecting other people's answers and comments.

I'd like to fix this.

There is a simple way to fix this, as explained in this answer to the above question and elsewhere: surround such posts with $\require{begingroup}\begingroup$ ... $\endgroup$

(My first example can be seen in the source of this answer of mine.)

And I'm perfectly willing to go through all of the above posts, and apply this fix.

However, a disadvantage is that all these posts will suddenly jump to the top of the 'active' lists, for no good reason. That's probably considered bad form. (And there is no way to indicate 'trivial edits', or is there?)

Another disadvantage is that occasionally people have used a \newcommand of mine in a comment on that post. So using begingroup would make those start to fail.

Finally, the actual chance of having a conflict is low, except in those cases where I've used something like \newcommand{\equiv}{\Leftrightarrow} to redefine a predefined MathJax command. So going back applying this fix might not be worth it.

So my question is: Should I fix this?

Answer 1

In my opinion, the obvious solution would be to gradually edit all and only those posts where you have redefined a predefined LaTeX-MathJax command. The reasons are as follows:

1. If anyone wants to submit a new answer they might not understand why their LaTeX is not working. Worse still, it is possible that their accidental use of your redefined command might cause their page to crash, making them lose their work.

2. The only reason anyone would need to use a non-predefined new command that clashes with your definition is that they want to define it. In that case they would almost surely define it at the start of their answer, so your definition would not affect them.

3. There is a possibility that someone would think that a command existed and used it, and it so happens to work because of your definition. In this case it is also unnecessary to edit your post and not good to do so unless you also edit theirs.

4. As pointed out by others, gradually editing the problematic posts will not push them all to the front page at once. Also, I doubt there are many of your posts that actually redefine predefined commands, so it should not take that long.