Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-26978548-20170716025028/@comment-32354545-20170716092142

Hi there Fan26. It looks like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a template works. Ofc nobody wants to just get redirected to a giant help page, so:

A template is not built by constructing this:

But rather, it is built by filling the template page with code - any code you would like to use by calling on many pages without typing it on each - optionally including parameters such as:
 * (which substitutes in an ugly "" if the template call does not specify that parameter, else it returns what has been specified)
 * (which substitutes in nothing if the template call does not specify that parameter, else it returns what has been specified)
 * (which substitutes in "foo" if the template call does not specify that parameter, else it returns what has been specified)
 * (which if that parameter is specified returns, which demonstrates how to make more wikitext than just the parameter itself conditional on the parameter being defined.
 * Infobox templates have been given special parameters in a new format without brackets, using the  tag.

A template call, such as might be filled in from that first box of this post, is then used on another page to retrieve the text of the template page, and parameters are used to fill in the blanks.

The template for the template call, as seen in the first box of this post, is typically constructed from the template's name and a listing of its parameters, and then saved somewhere so that it can be pasted into pages and filled. It is useful to include it on the template page itself, but that must be done within  tags so that it is not included in the template itself - otherwise every time the template is called, that template call will have to call that template will have to call that template... This is a template loop.

Due to an incompetence of explanation of wikitext, infoboxes are advised by Wikia to be made in the Infobox Builder; I like to work from source code, though, so I don't have any advice in that regard. Though - are you trying to copy this template from somewhere? If so, where? We can show you the easy (and correctly-credited) way.