User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Magic Words 101/@comment-1474707-20130207221557/@comment-166269-20130207231516

became much more useful after Wikia added support for italicizing parts of the page title with it (I don't know when this support was added, but I know I waited quite a while for it).

Just about anyone who works with templates needs to have at least a working knowledge of the simpler parser functions, and there are all sorts of neat tricks you find to make template code shorter and more efficient as you deepen your knowledge. Personally, though, I'm waiting for Lua templates to make their way here; the coding for ParserFunctions was pushed to its limits years ago and, since then, the only progress that's really happened has been in improved hardware.