As of 2014 this is now a "magic word", the template can be deleted or kept as dummy.

This template existed to provide a way to easily escape the raw pipe character (|) in a situation where markup containing it (i.e. a wikitable ) needs to be passed as a parameter to a template. Parser functions will mangle wikitable syntax and pipe characters, treating all the raw pipe characters as parameter dividers. This template 'hides' the pipe from the MediaWiki parser, ensuring that it is not considered until after all the templates and variables on a page have been expanded. It will then be interpreted as a table row or column separator.