Forum:"nowiki" problems

I've gone over the help several times and I suppose I probably just missed it, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to ask here then:

I wanted to use the template or style, or whatever its called where you have to the right side of the page general information about a country. (For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States )

However I had some trouble in doing this:

Here's what I did: I clicked "Edit this page" / "View Source", I copied the relevant text (all of the ) from the wiki to mine, and when I clicked on the Wikitext Source button, all that code I had copied had an additional tag applied to it. That is exactly what I did NOT want to happen. In fact its the exact 100% opposite of what I was trying to achieve by copying over the template or whatever its called. (I was going to copy it over, and then edit in my own information).

Now, I assumed at first (Because the first time I had used Wikipedia, the page for the United States) that the website's code was somehow incompatible, so then I found a similar design on a Wikia.com Wiki. However I got the same results: a tag. The extra space between wiki and > is to avoid formatting troubles.

So, can anyone explain why its doing this, or alternatively... where I might be able to find some Templates to use? The Help section talked ALL about Templates, except for where to actually find them. I haven't used wikis much so excuse me if I get the terminology incorrect or whatever.


 * Links please? ~