The popularity of question answering communities such as Yahoo! Answers and Naver Knowledge-iN and increasing doubts about the competence of lay information providers prompted this study to explore answerers' strategies to provide a credible answer in a question answering community. Forty-four active answerers in Yahoo! Answers were included in this study, and interviews were conducted through email, chat, and over the telephone. This study identified a set of information sources the answerers used, an array of important strategies to provide a credible answer, and their perception of self-claimed expertise. Implications of results were discussed in the context of user instruction.
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