<p>Clients who have money find it more reasonable to just pay a statistician and be able to hold him/her accountable for the deliverable, and get it on the agreed time. The CV site provides a rough product, at best, that the OP may or may not use, at their own risk. One cannot always share the complete data set; the posts where the OPs would refer to the data on their webpages are not very frequent, so the answer will inevitably be incomplete.</p>

<p>On top of these reasons against CV being a threat for professional consulting, the OP may or may not be able to discern a good answer from a lousy one if they don't have good enough clue about it to begin with. Professional statisticians are likely deliver concordant answers... except in situations when there's an insurmountable paradigm difference between Bayesians, data miners and/or mainstreamers, for the lack of better terminology. Voting scheme is fundamentally stupid: 10 voices of a rep-1 person are not worth 1 vote of whuber or Michael Chernick, but the system does not allow whuber's vote to be worth 10 points (which has a reverse wisdom, in the sense that whuber still provides professional rather than populist answers). Bad answers rarely receive good scores, but sometimes not-so-great answers receive higher scores than answers that I consider to be a much better fit.</p>

<p>I remember there was a passing discussion of the mailing list of the Statistical Consulting Section of ASA, and there was no sense of a threat coming from this site. </p>

<p>In a way, the website works as an integrator/referer: a lot of my posts would be a reference to Wikipedia and an explanation, in my own words, how the Wikipedia material applies to the original question. It also works as a filter: the task of finding the right paper on arXiv would be absolutely daunting, but there may be somebody on the site who just read it, and can point to it. So it mostly saves the search time, rather than solves the problem fully; and most users are fine with that, and are able to take it from there.</p>
