Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
Facts or friends?: distinguishing informational and conversational questions in social Q&A sites
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
A structuration approach to online communities of practice: The case of Q&A communities
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Seekers, sloths and social reference: homework questions submitted to a question-answering community
The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia - Special issue: Observing users of digital educational technologies
A comparative assessment of answer quality on four question answering sites
Journal of Information Science
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
The structure of argument patterns on a social Q&A site
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
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This study examines the strategies employed in justifying counter-arguments against answers provided in Q&A (question and answer) discussion. The study also explores how information sources are used in support of such arguments. The findings draw on the analysis of 100 discourse episodes focusing on global warming - a controversial topic eliciting competing answers from the participants. The empirical data were downloaded from Yahoo! Answers. Four strategies were identified. Of them, questioning the validity of answers and questioning the background assumptions of answers were used most frequently. While justifying counter-arguments, the participants also drew on emotional appeals and questioned the contributor's motives. To support the counter-arguments, the participants mainly drew on internet-based sources of information. The controversial nature of the discussion topic was reflected in the debate about the most authoritative information sources: persuasive material advocating a particular viewpoint to global warming vs objective research reports.