It allows us to link to one of the questions directly and easily in responding to somebody. One of the issues we have in my community is that we have a large amount of documentation and it covers pretty much everything, but people are overwhelmed when they arrive (“my cat is dying”) and don’t read, and the people who respond are not very tech-savvy, so asking them to (on Facebook) copy and paste the link to a Google Doc in their response is too much – they just don’t do it.
Discourse makes it much easier for non-techy people to link to stuff inside the community: click the little linky button, start typing a keyword or the name of the thing you want to link to, and there you go. We want to make it easy to refer to people to a single item in the FAQ rather than the whole FAQ.