Ideally you shouldn’t do what you do since it’s bypassing the history feature of XWiki which is there to track all changes, whatever they are, for accountability and more.
Mentions are sent only when a new mention macro is added. Thus if you make a change to a page which contains an existing mention, the mention notification won’t be sent.
The only debate to be had is whether notifications should be visible when you add a mention to a page and save the page as a minor edit. It could be consistent with our notifications to not show them by default (with an option to receive them for minor edits too,). However, it would also remove some use case, like the ability to mention someone to check a refactoring on the page.
XWiki seams to do some correction in the mention in some cases.
I can not reproduce this behavior, but today i receive a notification for a page with a existing mention and the history looks like this:
Yes, when using the WYSIWYG editor, the content is parsed, transformed as HTML, then you make modifications to the HTML in the WYSIWYG editor and when saving, the content is parsed as HTML, and converted again in the original document syntax.
Thus, if the original content was using some syntax “shortcuts” and not the canonical form, it’s transformed into the canonical form.
As I said, you’ll only get a notification the first time a mention macro is used (or maybe when it’s parameters are changed, to be checked). So when editing existing docs you won’t receive new mentions if you don’t change the mention macros.