<p>As a very "journeyman" statistician myself, I feel somewhat qualified to post an answer expressing skepticism about the power of the less academically high-powered to make a serious dent in the "unanswered questions" issue.</p>

<p>I scored 99.5% in my undergraduate stats exams, but despite a fair amount of self-study since then, I've never taken a Masters, had further professional training, or sought membership/certification with a professional body. My own ability to contribute at CV is probably at the high end of what could be expected for a good undergraduate or recent graduate.</p>

<p>I find that there are enough things for me to do here that I can perform some useful services. I am confident that most of my answers represent "low-hanging fruit" that would have received a perfectly good answer without my intervention. In that respect I am simply saving someone else some work - though even this isn't entirely clear-cut, as I have seldom been the only person to answer a question.</p>

<p>Where I fall down compared to a full-time industrial or academic statistician, is the range of questions I feel capable to answer. I can't really comment about the Machine Learning as I have little experience of that field, and can't judge how many of those questions are essentially at entry-level (this may be large, if anecdotes about how many people started doing it right after taking an introductory MOOC are correct, but the plural of anecdote isn't data). Of the traditionally statistical questions, fairly few seem (a) clear, (b) accessible to someone with an undergraduate background, (c) sitting around for a long time without an answer.</p>

<p>There are a fair number of basic questions that don't stray beyond undergraduate level but are nevertheless hard to answer, because the OP is themselves confused about either what they want to achieve, or the statistical methods which they want to use. On close examination, many of the questions seem to be posted here because the OP has fundamental misunderstanding (sometimes conceptual, sometimes simply of notation or terminology) and once that is cleared up, most likely after discussion in the comments, there is "no question to answer". (I'm skeptical whether some of these questions should be allowed to fester after the OP's issue is resolved - in the best cases, the Q&amp;A provides a good resource that tackles a common misunderstanding. Other times I suspect folk who arrive here via search engine because they were confused about a topic in the first place, are only going to leave more confused. This is a parenthetical issue, but still an important one, because it hints that the costs of the "delete really poor questions" strategy that @Glen_b mentions above may not be too high.)</p>

<p>I do some freelance statistical consultancy, and the sort of problems I encounter there rarely match even the "easy end" of CV questions. The most common outcome is that people end up paying me to explain what a t-test, or equivalent, is and what the results mean for their data (or simply what a "test" is, at all). Only on very rare occasions, either where they are doing something very important or unusually complex, have I felt it appropriate to suggest a potential client instead consults a chartered statistician (who would roughly charge what I do but with a zero on the end). In my experience most novices only want very basic answers to basic questions, and as a "journeyman" statistician I am more than qualified to help them. But because their knowledge is so limited, they're very rarely able to formulate the question in the first place. It can take considerable discussion to work out what they are trying to achieve, and only at this point am I able to suggest some possible approaches that could meet their needs. This initial two-way communication stage can be pretty hard work, and even with "comments", is not well-suited to an internet Q&amp;A site. This is probably a good thing - CV would otherwise be deluged with "novice data analysis" questions. But it does mean that those which do end up here, are often unclear, poorly suited for the format, and hence hard to answer.</p>

<p>On harder questions, I'm aware that even experts here rarely answer beyond a couple of fairly specialised fields. I wonder if unanswered questions represent a gap between tastes or skill-sets of answerers and the requirements of posters? If so, more journeymen seem unlikely to make much impact. It may also be due in part, as CV becomes better known, to an increase in poorly phrased "novice questions" where the gap is of the <em>patience</em> of answerers to unpick what has been misunderstood, or what information the questioner is really trying to ascertain. These options aren't mutually exclusive. They are also testable hypotheses - take a sample of answerers and ask them to classify questions based on such things as whether they are in their field/out of field (perhaps with some finer distinctions such as "slightly out of my field but could probably answer if I did a bit of research"), clarity of the question, expected effort it would take to answer, and whether they would be likely to submit an answer (or at least a tentative or clarifying comment).</p>
