Characters entered in this field will be added to any processed text nodes before the pattern matching is performed, that means before the text note is being compared with the existing article numbers. This is how you can add missing characters to text nodes which presumably could be article numbers, this is solely added for the purpose of pattern matching. The added characters are neither stored on the pages nor in the database.
The contents of text nodes themselves will not be changed by this. Please be aware of the comments about wildcards at the beginning of this chapter.