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? 12:18, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * If you're using the new editor, you need to switch to source mode to copy it across. Per Ose, where are you having the issue? (Note, Wikipedia also uses an extension called HTML Tidy, which tries to clean up HTML. Since we don't run it, it can be oddly-coded templates from Wikipedia can have issues here, but this may be unrelated). 13:46, 13 May 2009 (UTC)