Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-26571789-20191213154051/@comment-9605025-20191215043323

What you save as page content is not literally what viewers see. This seems like an obvious fact but the implication is that some program somewhere has to take the page content as provided by users and interpret what the page should look like. This program involves many steps and those steps are done in a certain order. Because of the order in which certain steps are performed, you need "Template:!" so that your "|" gets interpreted correctly. Use of this template is so common that latter versions of MediaWiki made it a magic word. Magic words are sort of like built-in templates; they exist as part of the base program and do not require a page in the template namespace. Once Wikia performs the promised MediaWiki upgrade, wikis will be able to use the magic word and will no longer need the template. However, until then, the template is still needed.