Recently discovered this when I saw one of my own creations in the new pages feed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Campori
Its marked as no citations, but every version of the page had at least one reference. It uses The shortened footnotes format {{sfn}}
Yup, the {{sfn}} format is what's throwing it off. Page Cuartion specifically looks for <ref> tags.
From the top of my head, I believe there's one place in the code where we're parsing the page. In that same block we could look there for citation-like markup (e.g. <sup>[integer]</sup). There's probably also a more MediaWiki-ish way to detect references.
We could probably put in something in the Cite extension that adds information to the ParserOutput object about references on the page (somewhat similar to how tracking categories and the link/category arrays work), and then check that in PageTriage.
Just to note another example that I found today in case it is helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_of_22_August_1917 was a page referenced using {{sfn}}/Harvard style references that also showed up as no citations in the feed.
moved here since the closed-as-duplicate ticket, T313780: Detect {{Sfn}} as being a reference when deciding whether to apply "No references" page_tag was in this column.
Change 833888 had a related patch set uploaded (by MPGuy2824; author: MPGuy2824):
[mediawiki/extensions/PageTriage@master] PageCuration: Detect {{Sfn}} as being a reference while applying the "No references" page_tag
Change 858991 had a related patch set uploaded (by Kosta Harlan; author: Kosta Harlan):
[mediawiki/extensions/PageTriage@master] [hygiene] Clean up checkReferenceTag method
Change 833888 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/PageTriage@master] PageCuration: Detect {{Sfn}} and {{Harvnb}} templates as references
Change 858991 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/PageTriage@master] [hygiene] Clean up checkReferenceTag method