[jmreid]

For the section that isn't actual body copy and isn't for reading as one article?

That's not a good example of where multi-column works "nicely".

[haakon-wium-lie]

It's a way of using multicol to save screenspace. For Wikipedia references, this works well even in scrolled environments. It would not work so well for body text du to columns then being longer than the height of the screen. For longer articles, pagination is required.