User talk:AmericanaLife

TESOL
Hi there, and thanks for your edit to TESOL. :) Unfortunately, though, I had to undo it, for two reasons. The first is that the page is a disambiguation page, not an encyclopedia article. Disambiguation pages exist only to help readers to get to the article they are looking for, so adding a lot of text to them is counterproductive. Also, in Wikipedia we generally use sentence case rather than capitalise things where possible. For example, when we mean the organisation, we would write "Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages", but when we just mean the act of teaching English, we would write "teaching English to speakers of other languages". Let me know if you have any questions about this, or anything else at Wikipedia for that matter, and I'll do my best to help. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 00:45, 13 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Dear Mr. Stradivarius,
 * Thank you for informing me about what the TESOL page means. I am new to this so I appreciate any help I get. I am trying to edit few pages and add few articles. For instance TESOL page has totally irrelevant sections such as (Tramitación Electrónica de Solicitudes, the Spanish online transaction processing system) that has nothing todo with TESOL. I am not even sure why this section is there? / On the other hand there is a link to TESOL International Association and only to them. This organization although a reputable one, but is not the only TESOL organization world wide. TESOL USA, TESOL Canada, UNESCO, TESOL Arabia, College of Teachers in UK, CELTA in Cambridge University and few other organizations are main TESOL organizations and I believe they should be there. Following are my questions and I hope you can better guide me in my path to contribute to Wikipedia.
 * How to add new article and new pages? How to add new terminologies such as TFSOL for French language, TSSOL for Spanish language or TASOL that stands for " Teaching arabic to Speakers of Other Languages”? How to add additional information about TESOL organizations worldwide?
 * Should they be completely separate pages or should there be links in TESOL page to them?
 * My goal is to inform the general public about the nature and origin/ history of programs without promoting one program or the other. As a matter of fact I have tried to stay away from outside links or external links to minimize chances of marketing or promotion.
 * I hope you understand my direction.
 * Please guide me if you can,
 * Yours AmericanaLife AmericanaLife (talk) 01:01, 13 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I'll answer that question in a second, but first I have a different question for you. I noticed that you have been signing your posts with your real name. Are you sure that this is what you want? This can expose you to harrassment, especially if you are thinking of possibly editing in any controversial topic areas. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 01:12, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Let me explain some more. All the edits that you make on Wikipedia are kept forever in the page history, unless those edits are specifically removed. So if you edit with your real name, then anyone on the Internet will be able to see what your editing habits are, what time of day you edit Wikipedia, what subjects you are interested in, etc. Also, if you somehow manage to annoy someone on Wikipedia (this happens particularly to admins who work in page deletion, but can happen for a variety of reasons), then if they know your real identity, it might be possible for them to find out personal information about you that you aren't happy with sharing. For example, we have had editors who have had people call their place of work and complain to their boss about their Wikipedia edits. I'm not saying that this will happen to you, nor that it's particularly likely, but now would be a good time to think about how you want to deal with your privacy on Wikipedia. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 01:21, 13 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Ok, now let me answer your main question. The TESOL page isn't about TESOL, it is about the letters "T", "E", "S", "O", "L". Anything that has the acronym TESOL can go on there, even if it's a Spanish online transaction processing system. :) Perhaps someone typed in "TESOL" into the search bar hoping to learn about Spanish online transaction processing systems - they wouldn't be too happy if all they found was a bunch of stuff about English teaching. Disambiguation pages like TESOL exist to help people find the article they are looking for, not to provide information about a topic. The flip side of this is that we can't have things that don't have the acronym "TESOL" on the TESOL page. We definitely can't have Cambridge CELTA, the College of Teachers, or UNESCO on there, for example. And we also can't have partial matches, so TESOL USA and TESOL Canada etc. probably shouldn't go on there either. TESOL International was previously known just as TESOL, so there are no problems with putting it on the page directly. Perhaps the best way to link to all of those organisations would be to create the article List of TESOL organisations and link to that list from the TESOL page.  A word about creating pages. Before you do the hard work of creating a page, make sure that the topic is notable. If you create pages about things that aren't notable, they will be deleted, which wastes time and causes heartache for everyone involved. To see how Wikipedia judges notability, see here. You should be safe with List of TESOL organisations, but make sure you check before creating other pages.  Also, we usually delete articles that are dictionary definitions, so if you create a page about TFSOL saying "TFSOL means teaching French to speakers of other languages", then that will probably be deleted too. Instead, you could create an entry at English as a second or foreign language and make a redirect to it from the TFSOL page.  Hopefully this should get you started, but let me know if you have any more questions. :) — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 02:02, 13 March 2014 (UTC)