On the English Wikipedia, I would use {{efn}}/{{notelist}} or a variant for this type of use.

When I copy this to the English Wikipedia (1.25wmf24), this does not occur. The ordered lists end and restart at the headings.

The two editors who reported the issue and my IE9 test system were fixed with the rule I provided in the description. I removed my fix and ensured that the problem occurred. I then applied your CSS and the problem is resolved.

Error messages are controlled by MediaWiki interface pages. Enter MediaWiki:Cite error ref no key into the search box and it will open the interface page. These pages have a default, so if it is not customized, the page does not actually exist as such and when you edit it, it shows as if you are creating a brand new page but it shows the default message. If you go to Special:AllMessages you can enter Cite error ref no key and it will show the default and the custom if it exists. If you enter Cite error is will show all cite error interface pages.

<ref /> is indeed invalid and triggers MediaWiki:Cite error ref no key which displays Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no content must have a name by default and is customized to The opening <ref> tag is malformed or has a bad name (see the help page). on the English Wikipedia which is a better description.

Looking at the original issue:

Rits: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Cite_errors/Cite_error_ref_no_key

This is moot with the update, ePub is no longer supported.

Yes, English Wikipedia.

Yes. Tested on the English Wikipedia with the page "Perfect competition" and a couple of others.

I tested this with {{who}} and {{citation needed}}: neither show in the PDF.

Works for me on a test page. The referenced article no longer uses <time>.

matmarex: You are correct. My search is acting odd on that page. There are no <ref> tags before <references/>, so it does nothing. There are <ref> tags after, so it triggers the automatically generated reference list. This is working as designed.

Linking to an archived wiki page is not useful as it cannot be edited to understand the issues. But looking at https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Canetti, the page has <references/> but no <ref> tags.

T73296 and T73311 are duplicates of this bug.

This template creates a table, thus this is a duplicate of T32706.

This template creates a table, thus this is a duplicate of T32706.

I customized my CSS so that the five tags in question show with a red background and I have a custom link in the sidebar for HTML validation. This allows me to see the issues and resolve them. I have been doing this for a few weeks now and I see some real problems with this proposal.

On enwiki we replace <big> with the {{big}} template where appropriate. I have found instances where <big> should have never been used at all and the markup just needs to be removed.