<p>Some of our "sister sites" in the SE network currently receive <em>much</em> more traffic and there may be lessons learned that we can transfer here.</p>

<p>Here are some that come to mind:</p>

<ol>
<li><strong>Judicious use of the <code>faq</code> tag</strong>. We don't appear to have a <code>faq</code> tag. But, the math website has taken to marking <em>particularly common</em> questions with <a href="https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/faq">this tag</a> in order to facilitate quick identification of the most common duplicates. All such tagged questions also show up on a special tab to the right of the "featured" tab on their site. We could potentially use such an approach here.</li>
<li><strong>Meta list to track major topics and the most common questions within each topic</strong>. Again, this comes from the math site and I find it to be a pretty useful feature, as long as you know it exists. The thread <a href="https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1868/list-of-generalizations-of-common-questions">List of Generalizations of Common Questions</a> contains the generalized versions of the most common questions by topic. (They even have a "statistics" topic, though the questions there are closer to elementary probability.) I think if we wanted to do something similar on this site, we'd probably want to adapt it a bit, but we get <em>lots</em> of repeat questions on linear regression, AN(C)OVA, Likert scales, basic time-series, etc. It would take some work on the front end to put together, but once started would be fairly easily updated. Note that each such question is also supposed to be marked <code>faq</code>.</li>
<li><strong>Searching on tags and keywords</strong>. The tags can at least help narrow down the topic when searching for duplicates, but it's not easy, especially, e.g., if you're looking for something under <code>r</code> or a similarly popular tag. The search facilities are pretty poor, in my opinion, but whuber and others have some nice tricks for squeezing as much out of them as possible. (<strong>Helpful hint</strong>: Doing an <em>empty</em> search via the search box reveals lots of handy options on how to narrow your search.)</li>
<li><strong>Google</strong>. The built-in search facilities being what they are, often a good Google search can uncover a duplicate pretty quickly. One particularly useful feature is to enter <code>site:stats.stackexchange.com</code> at the end of your search to limit the search to our domain. I've used this pretty often to find a duplicate for which I vaguely recall some feature (like an interesting phrase), but not the authors or title.</li>
</ol>

<p>I do not see an easy solution to more rapidly acclimating new users. They all have different incentives and different experiences with technology. Some come seeking immediate help and wouldn't be bothered to look at the FAQ anyway. I fear that is a problem that will persist. Asking politely whether they've searched for duplicates can help, but ultimately I suspect the burden will be on the active members to identify duplicates and vote to close.</p>

<p>Thus, I believe our most productive angle is to try to have some simple tools and procedures that accelerate our work.</p>
