Forum:Help with copying Wikipedia's ship infobox template

I'm an administrator at the Last Exile Wiki and I'm trying to make an infobox for the ships that appear in the show. I'm not good with templates and infoboxes, but Wikipedia's ship infobox is perfect for what I need. It's got all of the necessary parameters.

Now, I've copy/pasted Wikipedia's four ship infobox templates: Infobox ship begin, Infobox ship image, Infobox ship career, and Infobox ship characteristics to the wiki without changing their names.

Links to them on the wiki: Infobox ship begin, Infobox ship image, Infobox ship career, and Infobox ship characteristics.

The problem starts with Infobox ship career template. As soon as I start entering in information to go into the fields, the infobox freaks out. Infobox ship characteristics does this too. It starts displaying " " and "   " stuff.

Any help for figuring out why this freaks out is appreciated.

--TheBelgianGuy 19:24, November 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia's templates are hidiously complex, and it's probably better to design your own with the default Wikia one --  Random Time  19:26, November 1, 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, I need to learn how to make these things sometime. I'm just bummed because I got another template of theirs to work just fine.TheBelgianGuy 03:46, November 2, 2011 (UTC)


 * Do you have an example of the error? ForestMonthZero 04:31, November 2, 2011 (UTC)


 * Did you import all the relevant templates, CSS classes, etc? I notice that you're missing str find, str len , str left , str ≤ len , italics after . ForestMonthZero 04:43, November 2, 2011 (UTC)
 * Beside what forestmonthzero says, you are forgetting about two very important rule of thumb when using wikipedia information: Attribution (giving credits to the original creator) is a neccessity and using documentation is vital. You can do that in two ways:
 * - Export the page from wikipedia and import it on your wiki (find out how)
 * - Copy paste information from WikiPedia with using the comments to add an URL with timestamp to the moment you copied the template, and it's documentation. Do not forget to add a comment in the source stating your original source of the information.
 * You are violating the Terms of Use of both Wikia and Wikipedia if you are not attributing.
 * Beside that, Wikipedia is using a Page Protect template, WPMILHIST (=WikiPedia Military History) infobox style template, Ship image and ship caption template, and at the ship career template there are about 27 other templates in use not copied by you, which could hold other templates (also DO copy their documentation, and then you are likely to be needing to copy their documentation templates as well). It's not without reason above has been mentioned those templates used on wikipedia are quite extended and difficult to comprehend, because used and changed by very experienced long term wikipedia users over the course of sometimes years.