Actually, it turns out it's the same after all. When I tested it on Wikipedia I tried transcluding a page that had a namespace and it worked, but the page I was trying to transclude didn't have one. If you don't specify one it assumes it's in the Template namespace, and the page wasn't.

It's unfortunate, madness took me in the middle of the night and I set to work setting up a sort of smart stat system on the wiki. It would let you put in stats once on item pages and it made it so if you wanted to show all the stats of an item in a template all you would have to do is put in the item name. It also let the stat tables on the equipment pages update their stats automatically if stats had to be changed. Unfortunately, it required the page to transclude a page which transcluded the first page, which worked, but only after the page was edited a second time would the changes really "take." People probably would have been pissed if I changed things to work that way.