Comment by patwolf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patwolf | Hacker News Reader

I was trying to figure out something regarding county zoning by reading a 300-page pdf of county ordinances. Eventually I did a google search and found a FAQ on the county website that had a simple explanation of what I was looking for.

I do understand the argument that a need for a FAQ is symptom of poorly-structured content. But I do think context matters--if it's the federal government providing information about social security benefits, then sure, spend the time and resources to make good content. However, for the case of this small county government with limited resources, the FAQ is a very efficient. I'd rather a small number of my tax dollars be spent on the FAQ than a lot of my tax dollars on rewriting the PDF.

But by the same token, instead of having a FAQ with headings like, "What is the minimum setback for structures?" you could have had a simple document with headings like, "Minimum Setbacks for Structures."

One of the points in the document was that you can still have a document that's structured like a FAQ, just don't make it questions, make it answers.

I think part of the faq benefit is that its designed for people who hone in on faq pages already. Some people are not researchers. They are delegators. They'd rather come to your office and ask you "what is the minimum setback for structures" knowing full well its probably listed somewhere on your website/documents/etc, but they'd rather delegate the effort of looking up that information to you.

A faq page attempts to catch these people, and say "hey delegators, check here if your question has already been answered first before you spam our customer support." In that case, a document that's like a faq but not a faq won't do you any good. These people will just ignore it like the primary document and pound your customer support resources.

Wouldn't a better alternative be a summary of the 300 page document? Both that and a FAQ wouldn't be the canonical sources in a legal capacity, but a summary has the benefit of deduplication and is probably nicer to read (depending on how much you want to cross-reference in the FAQ)

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