From Wikipedia: Parking Chairs
clusterflock
I was just curious if Clusterflock had a Wikipedia page (it doesn't) and ran across this article on parking chairs during snowstorms...

View the article

Parking chair is an integral part of "the sum of all human knowledge".

Ah parking chairs. Reminds me of how much I don't miss living in the city.

This does actually become a much debated news item every winter.

Probably my favorite part of the article.

Yeah well Lock should have been knocked on the head as a polecat.

Is "clusterflock" a euphemism? I'd always heard the term "clusterfuck".

Clusterflock is not used in English, and is thus a neologism and not a euphemism. It's merely a shallow attempt to suggest a vulgarity in a username, without being literally vulgar. Like "Meet the Fockers." I would be surprised that any wp user named clusterflock (T-C-L-K-R-D) would get away with it. I cannot find any such user or anything like any such user. I think "Clusterflock" must be the name of some blogger someplace else on the net.

But Wikipedia is not censored!

Using the "revision history statistics", we see that "Parking Chair" it comes as little surprise that it is is essentially the creation of a single user, one Sebwite (T-C-L-K-R-D) , an individual who claims to be a vegetarian, a Scorpio, and likes to collect quarters.

The article is another example of excessive inclusionism, including pretentious analysis that smells of that there Original Research. Lots of MSM and web references (blogs?!), puffing it up to avoid summary deletion. The reason is pretty clear: you could reduce the article to a single sentence with no change to the amount of knowledge gathered by humanity. Once there, moving to Wiktionary or something is a no-brainer.

Question: suppose you are in Pittsburgh, and you are on some residential street with all these chairs on the road. Since you've never heard of this "parking chair" notion, it looks very surreal and strange. So, to answer the obvious question, you reach for your iPhone and enter ... what? I'd say most people would be hard-pressed to dig this out of the 'net. If you do enter the "right" query, it effectively answers the question!

You would almost certainly do better to just ask someone walking by. Which may highlight the point here: how much of the "sum of human knowledge" is this kind of idiosyncratic stuff, highly specific to a locality? Being useless anywhere else on Earth, it makes it a poor candidate for inclusion in a general encyclopedia. At best one may argue for its inclusion in the Sum of All Knowledge in the City of Pittsburgh, and maybe only certain streets at that.

I started a thread a while back about 'Driving in France'. It would be useful to have an article that listed the various useless laws they have there and in rest of Europe, like keeping a yellow jacket in the boot of the car. But of course there isn't one. The only such articles are

Driving in Slovenia
Driving in Singapore
Driving in United Kingdom
Driving in United States
Driving in Canada

However if you pointed this you would only get some nonsense like WP:NOTFINISHED or WP:SOFIXIT to which I say WP:SOFUCKIT

At one point there was an article called "Transport in Africa" that read, in its entirety, "There is transport in Africa." It was created solely in order to prevent a template from having a redlink.

All you need to do to get a "Driving in France" article is add a "Driving" section to the "Country" infobox template, and bam it'll get created by one of Wikipedia's anal-retentives who go into an apoplectic rage at the sight of a redlink.

For the record, we don't use chairs in London, and I have never heard of such a thing. We use dustbins.

or stolen traffic cones.

When I was in China they used a few spare little old ladies.

Is the Depression really that awful in London? We must start a fund to buy poor Peter Damian a chair so he doesn't have to sit on a dustbin. Please be generous at Christmastide.

Quite painful to sit on, though.

No one knows what it's like…
To be a dustbin,
In Shaftesbury,
With hooligans.

When you are drunk enough to think that stealing traffic cones is a good idea, they are comfortable enough.

And even when not drunk, doing it never fails to brings a smile to Shankbone's face.