Thread:Dinoguy1000/@comment-3388044-20160223050927/@comment-166269-20160223211530

is an enclosing tag pair: you put it around the content you want to nowiki. It can be used without any content (this usage in (X)HTML is sometimes called a void element), and  (with or without the space) is just a shorthand version (usually called a self-closing tag, and occasionally called a singleton (which, UIAM, is the computer-science-y term for it)) of the empty tag pair (they can be used interchangeably). In my experience, I've normally only had to use the empty pair/self-closing tag in templates, to force the parser to correctly parse some block-level content (usually lists or tables), e.g.