Template:Refbegin/doc

refbegin and its complementary closing template refend are used to apply any of several optional styles or presentational choices for bibliographies or reference lists&mdash;that is, lists of fully-specified references / sources / works cited, alpha-sorted by author/contributor) that appear in Wikiversity resources.

The formatting options provided by this template are:

Each use of refbegin whether with or without parameters, needs an accompanying refend closing template to 'turn off' the formatting; refend does not need any parameters.

Font size reduction is always applied. Either one, the other, or both of multi-columns and hanging indent may be applied as well (though see specifics and caveats on browser differences in relevant sections, below).

Usage
With all (optional) parameters shown:

Option 1: Text size (default behaviour)
The default usage (without parameters) applies a style that reduces the text size of the bibliographies/reference list entries. This can be useful to make a long bibliography/list of references display more compactly, and it also mimics the formatting style applied to footnotes by the reflist template.

The reflist formats footnotes—any text in the resource body that is placed between  tags—that are auto-generated by the cite extension, called by reflist. The font size should reduce to 90% for most browsers, but may appear to show at 100% for Internet Explorer and possibly other browsers. Reflist and Refbegin use each one CSS entry in MediaWiki:Common.css to set the font size:

div.reflist, div.refbegin { font-size: 90%; }

Editors may over-ride this setting by placing entries in their personal CSS.

If the 'full' footnotes referencing system is used (i.e. there is no separate bibliography/references list, all cites/references are defined in  tags), then use reflist alone:

Option 2: Multiple columns
If an integer n is supplied as the first parameter, the template will display the bibliography/references list in n columns. This may be useful for compact display for a lengthy list, and matches also the optional capability of reflist to display output in multiple columns. Thus, will display the list in two columns. If no integer parameter is specified, the default is a single column. Note, it will rarely be useful or practical to display bibliography/references list entries in more than two columns.

If a value with a unit is supplied as the first parameter, i.e. 30em, the template will display the bibliography/references list in columns with a minimum width of that value, allowing the browser to determine the optimal number of columns. Using for instance is useful for short citations.

Browser support
Multiple columns are generated by using CSS3, which is still in development; thus only browsers that properly support the multi-column property will show multiple columns. See here for more information.

Option 3: Hanging indentation
A hanging indentation may be applied to bibliographies/reference lists by using the indent parameter. This option can be useful in long bibliographies/reference lists and in particular when individual entries in the list are long, i.e. they wrap over more than one line in the browser display window. Applying a hanging indent to the list makes it much easier to distinguish the keywords (i.e. normally the authors' names) in the bibliography and makes them stand out from preceding and succeeding lines of text. Hanging indents in bibliographies also form part of several widely used citation style implementations, such as APA, MLA, and Chicago.

In order for indents to display properly, do not use bullet markers (*); you must use indent markers (:) instead.

To use, set.


 * Examples

a) Using refbegin with the hanging indent option |indent=yes applied: