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Template talk:Reflist

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reflist template is being systematically removed

The bot User:DreamRimmer bot II is doing a mass removal of this template from articles. Is there some discussion/approval for that indicating broad consensus among Wikipedia editors? If not, I would recommend the bot's recent edits be mass reverted pending a wider discussion. The current bot behavior is not explicitly justified anywhere I can see, and seems disruptive. –jacobolus (t) 11:28, 16 December 2025 (UTC)

The relevant BRFA seems to be Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DreamRimmer bot II 6, unless you're seeing it remove reflist where it's not using LDR. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:15, 16 December 2025 (UTC)
Replacement of {{reflist|refs=...}} with <references>...</references> is following an RFC at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 223#Bot to make list-defined references editable with the VisualEditor. See also Wikipedia:Bot requests#c-Anomie-20250903154600-Alenoach-20250903152500, where I predicted exactly this sort of complaint. Anomie⚔ 13:32, 16 December 2025 (UTC)
The bot just started making mass change, with the edit summary "Standardise list-defined references format" and no link anywhere in sight to a discussion.
The proposal was frankly poorly thought through, poorly written, incompletely discussed, and is being poorly implemented. In particular there is a lack of communication about what is being done and why, and none of the changes is reflected in the 4+ relevant documentation pages across the site.
If you predicted this, it would have been nice if more careful and considered action was taken up front to make less of a mess. –jacobolus (t) 13:50, 16 December 2025 (UTC)
If that's the edit summary the bot is using, a polite request to the bot op would likely get results without all the melodrama. Regarding the documentation, {{sofixit}}. Anomie⚔ 14:07, 16 December 2025 (UTC)
I believe I have done my best to explain the task. It felt like comments were being added without fully reading my replies. I was working on something else, but when I received an email about your ping on the bot talk page, I opened my system to respond. I stopped the bot twice and clearly explained the situation each time. If you still feel that I missed something, I apologise. You are welcome to suggest any changes to the process if you feel it is being poorly implemented. – DreamRimmer ■ 15:06, 16 December 2025 (UTC)
Maybe it would help for the edit summary to link to the RFC?
Anyway, fwiw: this replacement is intended to make little or no visible change to articles but to work around a never-going-to-be-fixed visual editor bug that makes it difficult to edit templates nested inside other templates. List-defined reference citation templates inside the references tag can be edited by VE. List-defined reference citation templates inside a reflist cannot. And they come out looking the same. So we should use the more flexible option. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:49, 16 December 2025 (UTC)
This question has been resolved, and the bot has resumed this task with a better edit summary.
There is now a follow-on discussion about what our documentation should recommend (<references /> vs. {{reflist}}) outside of the case of list-defined references. See Help talk:Footnotes § Tag or template preference if interested. -- Beland (talk) 05:30, 18 December 2025 (UTC)

Did the recent change somehow break VE?

Using VE, it is no longer possible to click on references in the reflist to edit them (it just brings up the template dialog). I had assumed this was a VE bug, but I've checked other wikis on the same MW version as enwiki (specifically itwiki and eswiki) and they worked fine. I have no idea how it could have broken this, but I figured I'd ask here anyway. And no, this does not have to do with list-defined references, it's for every article using "normal" references with the reflist template, which used to work; just look at Seattle for one example among many. Pinging @Anomie, who made the change. Jay8g [V•T•E] 07:47, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

WTF VE? Apparently it chokes when {{#tag:references}} isn't wrapped in a div? ... Also, VE seems to get ridiculously confused by Template:Reflist/testcases. Anyway, as far as I can tell Special:Diff/1328019882 fixed it. Anomie⚔ 13:09, 17 December 2025 (UTC)

Remaining LDR compatibility fixes

Since we've been talking about cases of incompatibility between list-defined references and Visual Editor that the bot can't handle, I checked the 2025-12-01 database dump to see how many of these there are.

-- Beland (talk) 18:42, 18 December 2025 (UTC)

I have fixed some in the list above, which I have struck through. -- Beland (talk) 18:48, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
What do you consider "empty parameters or malformed syntax"? I see only four pages in Category:Pages using reflist with unknown parameters. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:49, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
I see a lot of pages with "refs" but no "=" (this seems to work), "||" or "| |" instead of "|", a few invalid values for "colwidth" (like "2" and "35"), and a handful of invalid unnamed parameter values like "columns", "!", "35", "em30", and "em". -- Beland (talk) 20:25, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
If anyone wants to help! A lot of the individually-listed articles above just have crazy referencing where the multiple lists can be consolidated into a single normal list. A common problem is that copyright references are separated out from other references to avoid repeating the collection name, but repeating the collection name in each individual reference is the right thing to do for downstream ingestion and reader convenience. -- Beland (talk) 09:35, 19 December 2025 (UTC)
6,324 cases where the number of columns is being specified. This no longer works, Like {{reflist|2}}? Specifying 2, when the article has >10 refs, is the same as the default behavior (except probably in Minerva, which uses 25em by default but |2 will use 30em). When the article has 10 or fewer, |2 will still do columns where <references /> won't. Specifying 1 is equivalent to <references responsive=0 />. Specifying any other number uses 25em or 22.5em depending on the skin. Anomie⚔ 20:02, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
Right, there are some effects, I just mean this no longer actually results in the specified number of columns being rendered. So these should probably be replaced regardless of VE compatibility issues, to avoid confusion. I would assume replacing {{reflist|2}} with the default <references /> is OK because having columns when there are fewer than 10 items will look bad on wide screens. -- Beland (talk) 20:29, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
I'd agree, but some people might complain that they really really want the columns anyway. 😅 Anomie⚔ 20:57, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
Heh, I mean some people complain if you give them free money. Not a reason not to proceed unless there's a good articulated reason. 8) -- Beland (talk) 23:36, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
The only complication would be if there are multiple instances on the same page. I don't know if VE would be happy with it, but a {{refwidth-wrap}} template could probably handle that. Also, did you check for articles with {{notelist}} or variants? Anomie⚔ 20:02, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you're proposing for {{refwidth wrap}}? VE cannot adequately handle situations where lists of references are inside of a template.
After I started manually fixing pages, yeah, I realized that we need to fix both instances of {{notelist}} using LDRs on its own, and deal with instances of notelist + reflist on the same page. I did a database grep and will report back after enjoying a bit of time in the great outdoors. -- Beland (talk) 20:19, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
I should have said {{refwidth begin}}. Sorry. 🙁 The idea being that {{refwidth begin}} would output an unclosed <div class="refwidth-short"> or the like, and the styles would target .refwidth-short .mw-references-columns, so as to keep the different <references /> separate. Anomie⚔ 20:27, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
I believe that would work if paired with a {{refwidth end}}, though given all the moving parts I'm not 100% certain until seeing a working implementation. 8) -- Beland (talk) 20:31, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
On the VisualEditor though? {{Refbegin}} and {{refend}} don't work well on VisualEditor. They have the same problems that {{reflist|refs=}} has. Rjjiii (talk) 22:53, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
Best way to find out is to try it. -- Beland (talk) 00:02, 19 December 2025 (UTC)
I checked this just using the {{refbegin}} and {{refend}} tags. Those 2 opening and closing templates obscure the references. I also tried just wrapping the references section in arbitrary <div>...</div> tags. The html tags did not obscure the references. It's something about the div coming from the templates. I don't know a way around it, but there are loads of folks here more knowledgeable than I am. Also, if anybody want to see what I am talking about try editing the references section in the two links below using the Visual Editor to see the difference:
Rjjiii (talk) 05:39, 19 December 2025 (UTC)
These may be overcounts if "refs=" appears with no value but the close braces are not on the same line. When I say {{notelist}} below, I'm including all the notelist-XXX variants.
  • I find 166 articles that use {{notelist}} more than once, with at least one having LDRs. This happens a lot for notes at the bottom of a table. (This seems like a place where having multiple columns is not a good idea.)
  • I find 542 articles that use both {{notelist}} and {{reflist}} with LDRs for at least one instance of each template.
  • This is out of at most 4,049 articles that use {{notelist}} with LDRs and 144,552 articles that use {{reflist}} with LDRs.
-- Beland (talk) 04:50, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Requested move 20 June 2026

Template:Reflist → TM:Reference listTM:Reference list – This template is a holdout to the general trend towards expanding template names for clarity per Wikipedia:Template namespace § Template names:

Template names should be made of one or more words, and describe the template clearly, as in {{Math topics sidebar}}. Template names are easiest to remember if they follow standard English spelling, spacing, and capitalization. Avoid having templates whose names differ only in case, spacing, or punctuation.

Of course, the old title will still remain a redirect so people can keep using it as a shortcut. FaviFake (talk) 11:11, 20 June 2026 (UTC) — Relisting. 1isall (talk | contribs) 18:26, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

Personally, I've never liked the trend towards overly long names for templates, and for this template in particular that's used on millions of pages I can't see the point of making the job queue reprocess them all. Anomie⚔ 12:18, 24 June 2026 (UTC)
You consider Reference list to be overly long? FaviFake (talk) 12:52, 24 June 2026 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Not worth the effort. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:23, 28 June 2026 (UTC)
    ... what effort? We shouldn't rename a template that clearly violates our guidelines because of the effort that it would take to click the "Move" button? FaviFake (talk) 11:22, 28 June 2026 (UTC)
    No, rather because of what happens next. See for example Anomie's comment. Nikkimaria (talk) 23:45, 28 June 2026 (UTC)
  • Support per very long-standing guideline. Opposition seems to only personal dislike or misplaced concern for momentary server load. -- Netoholic @ 02:57, 29 June 2026 (UTC)
  • Oppose because of all the watchlist churn that is likely to ensue once gnomes and bots start replacing the template (as we know they are going to want to do if its official name is changed). —David Eppstein (talk) 06:33, 29 June 2026 (UTC)