<p>CV (and the field of statistics in general) seems to suffer from the problem that basic statistics knowledge is necessary in so many fields and required to solve so many problems, yet professional statisticians are few and far between. This I think is the main reason why there are so many new unanswered questions every day on this site. (As a corollary, I think this stackexchange can never be the 'small numbers of high quality curated answers' site that some people seem to think it should be.)</p>

<p>Speaking as a non-expert who nevertheless uses statistics quite a bit (a chemistry PhD who now does Data Science), I do occasionally depend on CV to fill in gaps in my self-taught stats knowledge. Some of my questions will be ill-formulated because I don't know what I don't know. Rejecting or discouraging amateurish questions related to peoples jobs <em>prima facie</em> I think would be a mistake.</p>

<p>However, I do think effort on the part of the asker needs to be put into making their question as general as possible. As ever, some proof-of-work or proof-of-googling needs to be apparent. </p>

<p>On the third hand, statistics is one of those fields where it may not be at all apparent how carefully you need to think through a problem and make allowances for subtle issues in the data. Many people may come asking for a technique recommendation not knowing that their problem lies elsewhere. The best response, as ever, is patience.    </p>
