Do you sometimes, seemingly at random, get one paragraph on your page that looks like this one?  With a dashed box around it, shaded background and monotype font?

While the rest of the page looks "normal"?

Fear not! You can be sure that you left some white space before the first word in the "boxed" paragraph. You see, the wiki is very picky. At least, when it comes to how you type the text of the page. Never leave any white space at the beginning of a line!

Just click edit, and look for the "boxed" paragraph, and you'll see that it starts with one or more spaces.

OK, but this is annoying! why does the wiki do this?

Yes, it is annoying, unless you wanted to, say, include a verbatim example of some text, or a quote, in your page. Then it turns out that this is actually a pretty useful feature. If you wanted to quote a piece of text from some other source, and keep it all aligned vertically and horizontally as in the original, all you have to do is just leave a space at the beginning of each line. This page has several examples - ok, these are examples out of the tech world, but there is no reason why you couldn't make use of it for excerpts from financial texts, literary, or anything else.

Another thing to remember is that normally, the wiki wraps words around at the end of a line automatically. In verbatim text however, the wiki respects all the line breaks, column alignments, etc. So if you have a very long sentence in a verbatim block without any newlines, it will be printed without autmatic word wrap, and you'll have to scroll the window far to the right to read the whole sentence. In other words: you'll want to break your lines yourself.