Please clarify the bug report stating:

• what you write as wikitext (e.g. "an article with references but not <references />" at the end)
• what you have or don't have as result
• what you expect to have

My actual scenario was editing newly created articles from an editathon. They knew to add references but didn't include <references/>. As the functionality of adding the reference list to the end of the article was new to me, I didn't notice they had failed to include it (especially because they did include the final "References" heading).

As someone who does see all the CS1 errors, noting the complete lack of <references/> seems to be a good thing to add.

For reference:

• CS1 is a reference to [[en:Help:Citation_Style_1]].
• the references include if missing feature has been introduced by change I9c7c13269d5ec355ccb280402aa8c0cedd208883 per bug 66860

Mark Hurd request would be satisfied if we revert the change or if we add an extra message in addition to the automatic references inclusion. It could be an CSS-hidden error message.

Previous bug bug 66860 comment 10 also suggested another solution, to create an hidden category, which is explored in bug 67700.