Talk:Nasal Variables

I would prefer to keep a professional, not conversational tone, on the Wiki - so avoid 'what the heck'. Also better to use passive voice I think, instead of directly addressing the reader. (But, people might disagree) Zakalawe (talk) 13:18, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I fully agree, but I think that's my fault, however, in this case it's simply that it all started out as a private PM exchange between omega95 and myself a while ago, when he asked a few questions - in response to my feedback to his code, so it was indeed conversational in the first place, and only ended up here afterwards. As you probably have noticed, I usually copy/paste stuff over to the wiki to preserve possibly useful contents-I think this applies here and that the article should qualify, I just didn't bother to clean it up or make it less conversational. On the other hand, it obviously takes much less time to use copy/paste - so it's a compromise obviously. Then again, making the point (as well as responding to it) obviously takes longer than fixing the article instead :-) --Hooray (talk) 14:10, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I think we just need to teach Hooray how to write passive voice all the time – including PMs! ;-) —Philosopher (talk) 17:55, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

This is actually pretty true: If all our discussions/responses (forum, devel list) were to be written in a certain style, we could directly reuse stuff without having to edit things later on. Gijs also keeps reminding me that he doesn't approve of the personal style whenever I paste things here, but I'm just not eager to fix up every conversation that may contain useful stuff. Also, I have been told several times already that my responses tend to be too impersonal and too generic in nature... --Hooray (talk) 18:00, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Maybe it would make sense to look at it the other way around? Write a wiki article to answer a question and link to that article in the forum. You can then add some personalized stuff to your post to elaborate on things that aren't necessarily useful to anyone else.

Just a crazy Thursday evening idea :-)

Gijs (talk) 19:25, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Actually, that's not even all that crazy. In fact, a few articles got started that way even years ago, such as Howto:Start using vectors and hashes in Nasal which was also written in response to some questions that omega95/redneck raised back then. So, I'm aware that this route is better, but obviously it's also a matter of available spare time. Still, it is true - the community (and our docs!) would be in excellent shape if were to adopt this as the standard practice to respond to "new" questions in a future-safe way.--Hooray (talk) 20:44, 24 October 2013 (UTC)