This has probably been raised before (is there a bug for it?), but it appears to me that it would be significantly more user-friendly to append a <references/> section at the bottom of the text that is being parsed when it is missing.
This would * make it easier for new users to discover referencing functionality (oldbies could still properly reformat the tag); * solve the "references missing in section preview" problem.
Is there any obvious reason not to do this?