<p>I am not sure if we have to do anything special apart from </p>

<p>(a) promoting the site (discussed elsewhere), </p>

<p>(b) encouraging voting for content (also discussed elsewhere) and </p>

<p>(c) providing quality content (in terms of questions and answers). </p>

<p>I suspect that in the early days there will be a heavy skew to a few active users collecting the points but if the site takes off and gets greater numbers the number of high rep users will also broaden (both in terms of numbers and in terms of fields/abilities represented). A casual browsing of other beta SE sites shows a similar trend (few high rep-users).</p>

<p><strong>Added Later</strong></p>

<p>I should also add that another factor why we may not have broad base participation is that lots of statisticians/data mining/machine learning folks work in the industry where confidentiality considerations may prevent them from asking questions to resolve their issues on a public forum. This is not much of an issue for programming/software (as they can easily abstract away business info) or for math (as the questions there are mostly about pure math rather than applied).</p>
