**andr55** wrote:

(In reply to Bawolff (Brian Wolff) from comment #2)
> This was rejected way back in the day (bug 7865). I assume the rejection
> still stands.

It is a very bad assumption that a 7 year old rejection is still valid.
In case you hadn't noticed, both Mediawiki and extension:variables have changed since then.
 
> -----
> 
> 2) It keeps this string local to the only page where it will be used, thus
> not polluting the template namespace, and avoiding potential name conflicts
> with other templates.
> 
> Fun fact, there are
> 74106937111882365071085430405560261026092790186009960985252853765064
> 40296955904 possible template names, (This is an under-estimate, I didn't
> count most non-english letters). You could easily use
> Template:PageNameHere/Specific_string_name, or even just make it a subpage
> of the actual page not in the template namespace, etc. Now namespacing
> things might be nice just generally, but we're not running out of template
> names.

Assuming a 2-letter name, that gives only 676 possibilities.
But that is not the point.
It is not unreasonable to assume that many short names will conflict.  Disambiguation pages don't exist for nothing.
One advantage of variables local to a particular page is that such variables can be short, thus easier to type, without any ambiguity.  As noted above.

> 
> >It is rated as stable.
> 
> Just for the record, those ratings are done by the extension author. There
> are lots of extensions marked unstable which are actually more stable than
> the stable extensions. So the rating is pretty much meaningless. (Which
> isn't necessarily to say anything bad about this particular extension, I
> have no idea how stable it may or may not be)
> 
OK.  But note that this extension existed in 2006, and was last modified in 2011.  So it has been around for a while.  And the last 2 (recent) versions are installed on 170 sites.

%%%> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 7865 ***%%%

Not appropriate, for a very old bug rejected for circumstances which likely have changed.