If you are a new user, you maybe don't know what is acceptable in "spelling variant". Somebody may try to type raw text (e.g. "British English") or Qid, but neither will work.
Solution:
The spelling variant ambiguity caused a knock-on problem: a number of property proposals for phonetic transcriptions (for languages whose orthography doesn't give much information about pronunciation, e.g. Chinese) have been rejected with reasons along the lines of "they should be spelling variants". Some clarity is needed on this.