What is authenticity of this forum?

Question

I am an active member of stackoverflow and some other programmers related communities here. And they all are very good and working great. They are like must have for IT professionals.

But coming to religious matters, how is it good to let all kind of people answer the questions which must be answered by proper muftis, when we don't know the person answering is even a Muslim?? Or he is trying to inject some wrong beliefs in Islam? A person without any proper knowledge cannot give fatawa. So, how is this forum authentic and how is it not going to be disastrous as some people like me might give wrong opinions(which they thing are true) as they are not muftis and they are not supposed to give such statements and tell what Islam says about something when they don't have knowledge of it? And as lack of muftis here and no mechanism for answers to be checked by muftis, how can someone trust my answer?

A solution might be to have authenticated muftis on site, or a privilege like moderators a new privilege of MUFTI which will be awarded to only those who are actually mufti and they are able to prove it. They can mark any answer as approved by mufti, or their answers will be marked indicating they are mufti and their answers are more authentic.
Or anything like that to counter the fear i mentioned above.

Answer 1

We are not, nor have we ever been, a fatwa site.

If a question truly "must be answered by proper muftis" then it's important that it either be closed, downvoted into oblivion, or edited so that it can work here. We don't check credentials at the door, nor do we filter scholarly answers from non-scholars; given how against the Stack Exchange philosophy it is, this is also unlikely to change any time soon.

The fact that so many questions here aren't curated thus just indicates that the community at large still feels that these are perfectly acceptable questions to ask random strangers on the Internet (an opinion which I do not share).

If you want to encourage users who actually know what they're talking about, it's important to vote properly; if you feel that an answer as-written is just not useful coming from a random stranger on the street, downvote it. If an answer as-written is well-written, well-referenced and informative, and which would be just as useful coming from Shaykh Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid as it would from Joe Six-Pack in Milwaukee, then vote it up.

But if people insist on voting for posts that do nothing more than copy the first link they pulled from Google and/or from their fatwa site of choice (something which literally anybody can do), then that's what you're going to get: A site full of non-experts cribbing other people's work. The community reaps what it sows.

The voting mechanism is foundational to the Stack Exchange model; that's no different here than on any other Stack Exchange site. When applied properly, it does exactly what you're asking for here: It lets people trust your answer, because it was reviewed by and met the standards of the expert community. But if you build a site of non-experts, for non-experts, you're just going to end up with a bunch of answers that, as you fear, aren't (and probably shouldn't be) trusted by anyone.