Last modified: 2008-04-09 10:28:56 UTC
A page with only "<references/>" Will output a big, red "Cite error: Invalid <references group="" /> tag; group name "" not defined in <ref>" I'm marking this as a critical issue, because according to the last dumps it affects more than 10K pages on fr: (Still counting how many en: pages are affected)
Why is this behavior incorrect? If there are no <ref>s, it makes sense to raise an error if <references /> is present. For instance, on enwiki, a <references /> with no refs will almost always give you an empty ==References== section, which is wrong anyway. The error message does what it's supposed to do, draw attention to a mistake that should be fixed. Arguably, you're right, this mistake is a minor one that would best be handled silently. Honestly, our error-checking is very inconsistent and it's hard to say whether we should be silent (which we usually are) or noisy (which Cite usually is). Either way, this is not major. A few articles will look a little odd and people will fix them as they see them. It helps to draw attention to articles without references, too. ;)
it also currently affects a few thousand pages on wikisource, because the proofreadpage extension automatically appends <references/> to page footer. I blanked the error message on fr.ws and en.ws, until the issue is resolved.
A noisy warning about empty is wrong because it's a technical warning in the absence of a technical problem. An empty <ref></ref> tag is a problem, because it indicates an incomplete footnote, but a <references /> tag without references is not a technical problem. Making it appear to be one will simply trigger the removal of <references /> tags from articles which are currently unreferenced, which is a very bad idea. That might sound like a good idea, having just encountered dozens of articles which had <ref></ref> references but no <references />. That's a real problem, and it's more likely to occur if <references /> is removed from every article which is currently unreferenced ... and it's a much more serious problem than the minor stylistic glitch of an empty ==References== section. Unreferenced articles should be tagged with {{unreferenced}}, and one widely-used way of doing this is to add a section ==References== <references /> {{unreferenced}} -- in other words, the <references /> tag is already in place for when refs added. Why impede this usage?
Fixed in r33003
