Bryan Derksen wrote:

I've noticed that the English Wikipedia is spitting out this error message in place of the <references/> tag when there are no <ref> tags anywhere in the article.

This is a new development, I believe? In the past I've sometimes thrown a <references/> tag (or more specifically the {{reflist}} template) into an existing references section even if there weren't currently any inline references in the article, since I just as often put <ref> tags into articles while neglecting to add a <references/> and wanted to make things easier on future editors who might make the same oversight. I'm not sure why this counts as an error now. Is it intentional?

This was added in r32492 to work around a low-level PHP notice message which displayed when a custom reference group was referenced with no members present.

I've reverted it in r33003; the message is removed, and a proper check for empty groups is now done so it doesn't trigger the PHP error message.

<references/> for an unused group (or default group) will now be silent, as it was before.

-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)