Thanks to everyone who's been helping.
As I get closer to my goal, I have some more complex questions regarding templates, protected pages, transclusions, pre-loading, etc.
It would be really useful to have a "test wiki" I could point people to to show them what I've done so far, and why it doesn't work.
Ideally, this would be one where any registered user could protect/unprotect pages (of course, giving any user the power to protect/unprotect pages makes protection meaningless, but this would be more to experiment with protected pages, not actually protect them).
Is there such a "test wiki" out there?
I realize I could create test pages and even templates on ANY wiki (even mediawiki.org or wikipedia.org), but it would be wrong to