Last modified: 2014-02-12 20:53:04 UTC
Suppose Template:X contained the string "{{#if:{{{1|}}}|1 was set|1 wasn't set}}". If {{X|foo<ref>bar</ref>}} is used, the reference to bar shouldn't show up in <references />, but it currently does (along with a broken backlink). The far more common case of this happening is on the English Wikipedia, where infobox labels contain a reference that should only appear if data for the label exists. Hacks in lua have been written to avoid looking at parameters to work around this problem. A much cleaner solution would be to only display references in the reference list if they've been unstripped during the page's parsing (or some equivalent way of checking that).
Note that Parsoid's parsing does not have this issue. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jackmcbarn/61248 and http://parsoid-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org/enwiki/User:Jackmcbarn/61248