User talk:(WT-en) Mendocinateacher

Welcome
Hello, Mendocinateacher! Welcome to Wikivoyage.

To help get you started contributing, we've created a tips for new contributors page, full of helpful links about policies and guidelines and style, as well as some important information on copyleft and basic stuff like how to edit a page. If you need help, check out Project:Help, or post a message in the travellers' pub.

Thanks for your contributions, but please have a look at Project:Don't tout. While it's great that you're passionate about your city and your language school, please be careful to remember that articles should be written as travel guides and not used for promotion. Doing things like creating multiple articles for a school and listing the town with major South American cities like Buenos Aires in an article like South America seems a bit overly promotional. If you disagree please feel free to discuss on the appropriate article's talk page. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 23:08, 25 January 2011 (EST)

Hi Ryan, thanks for the comments. I do not know what your exact position is with wikivoyage, you are probably just a passionate traveller who lies contributing to travel pages like myself.

Let me clear up one thing. I am an American woman with relatives here in Mendoza who has returned here to my roots after yerars of travelling to teach English at various institutes and private students. I do not have a business and do not teach Spanish. Yes, I have opinions, and I like to think I express them more objectively than most, but I am not touting anything. I am trying to provide objective detail travellers can actually use, and try to correct misinformation that I am always finding cause traveller´s problems, especially on sites like Wikipedia. For instance, the information of reciprocity fees in the Argentina entry was so badly informative I have met many travellers who have been badly screwed. I corrected yesterday that because I was so pissed off at the misinformation I corrected it in some detail. Perhaps the bad info was corrected in the past, but someone for whatever reason did not like the tone (shoot the messenger?) and edited out.

And, thanks for the welcome, but this is not the first attempt at trying to add to the information here. Several years ago I tried to contribute to wikipedia (under another account name I have since lost track of) with what I felt was relevant, dteailed and useful information, but got blanded out by editing much like your own. In particular, I linked up to very good information on both LP and Couchsurfing (I am a regular and respected contributor to these much more useful websites) -remember the strict attribution policy here- and got blotted out by   the policy not to refer to other competing websites, as well as other people, perhaps like yourself, who like to wield the broad sword of righteousness too broadly (some may call this reaction "overly anal", but I would never even mention such terms :)  )

Okay, let me give you some particular response to your objections.

1. Mendoza as a city listed in South America. Well, it is a major traveller´s destination, a lot more so than Montevideo, a city of about the same populaton which is for good reason left off of most itineraries. Then there are much bigger cities like Quito that have been left out (our edited out, who knows?). The inconsistency is not only maddening, it affects the credibility of the site.

2. Yes, I have provided details about certain language schools with soem opinion. Certainly this is not bad, especially considering strong opinions expressed about certain places, both overly positive and negative, such as about hostels. Again, felow contributors to wikpedia should try to recognize some balance is needed.

3. My piece about Spanish schools that you have listed for deletion does contain a lot of opinion, it is hardly tout. What is wrong with that, if comments are too ridiculous, they can always be changed or commented on. Such opinion is needed or nothing will be really said here, and people can always add or comment what they feel are coorections or balance. This is why LP and Couchsurfing is so vital and useful, and why wikivoyage, which you profess to love, is on the way to fading to irreevlance unless people feel free to give useful and less superficial info.

Hope to "discuss" things with you later, unless the frustration causes me to ignore the site again! —The preceding comment was added by (WT-en) Mendocinateacher (talk • contribs)


 * Hi! Again, thanks for contributing.  A couple of notes:


 * Wikivoyage isn't affiliated with Wikipedia. Both sites use the same software, and many editors here also edit at Wikipedia, but each site has very different policies and guidelines.  For example, Wikivoyage doesn't use citations, and the writing style at Wikivoyage is encouraged to be lively.
 * We often get new editors here eager to promote a favorite town or business who put multiple links to that town/business in articles across the site. The Project:Don't tout guideline is our policy that captures the reasoning why that's frowned upon - basically, the key thing to remember is that we are trying to write useful travel guides, and promoting a town or business should not be a primary goal; an article for a country or continent is a high-level overview that would become useless if we allowed mention of every city, school, restaurant, etc. in it.
 * The Spanish schools article was listed for deletion because it does not neatly fit into our Project:What is an article hierarchy, and also because you created a couple of different articles with the same content.


 * My intention is definitely not to chase you away, but at the same time it is a lot of work for other editors to review new contributions and copyedit them to meet Wikivoyage standards, and given the amount of material you contributed it seemed important to point you to some relevant guidelines as quickly as possible. -- (WT-en) Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 12:08, 26 January 2011 (EST)

Okay Ryan, my reference to Wikipedia was a slip, I meant wikivoyage. I appreciate the theory, but in practice your editing procedure promotes unlively discussion, as well as bland, impratical and erroenous information. Closing discussion due to some inconsistently applied "standards" have stifled open input in which the truth best works it way out. All the best, m