Editing Help:Footnotes (section)

==Reference lists: columns==
{{Shortcut|H:REFCOLS}}
{{Hatnote|Columns are not supported by Internet Explorer 9 and below; see {{tl|Reflist}} for technical details}}

Footnote lists generated by {{tl|Reflist}} or {{tag|references|s}} automatically split into columns if there are 10 or more items. The number of columns adjusts responsively to the width of the display, which can range from mobile phones and tablets to wide-screen "cinema" displays.

The CSS "column-width" property is by default set at 25–30 [[em (typography)|em]] depending on the skin. Browsers interpret this as a minimum width suggestion; if there is leftover space that cannot be used by an additional column, columns may render wider. This property can be adjusted with {{tl|reflist}} or {{tl|refwidth}}. {{tl|refwidth}} only allows three settings, "short", "medium", and "long". For example:

<syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext">
==References==
{{refwidth|short}}
<references />
</syntaxhighlight>

{{tl|reflist}} allows this property to be set directly. To accommodate different fonts and zoom settings, this should always be done in em and not pixels. For example, to make narrow columns similar to the "short" setting:

<syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext">
==References==
{{reflist|20em}}
</syntaxhighlight>

The "short" or "20em" setting is commonly used for [[Help:Shortened footnotes|shortened footnotes]], but not for [[Help:Citation Style 1|Citation Style 1]]. For a shortened footnote example, see {{oldid|NBR 224 and 420 Classes|442508215#Notes|NBR 224 and 420 Classes (13:32, 1 August 2011)}}.

Setting a [[Template:Reflist#Columns|specific number of columns]] in reflist now no longer actually sets the "column-count" CSS property; instances of {{tlx|reflist|2}} or {{tlx|reflist|3}} can be replaced with the default behavior or variant requesting a specific column width. Given the range of reader screen sizes, fixing the number of columns would result in wasted space for some readers and overly narrow columns for others.