<p>Someone raised this issue in Area 51, <a href="https://area51.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13476/overlap-with-existing-sites">Overlap with existing sites</a>, with only a little discussion.</p>

<p>I would think Cross Validated would be suitable for most Data Science topics, but apparently there is a perception that CV is for theoretical stats questions. The CV description is "a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization" which seems aligned with Data Science.</p>

<p>As far as the question of what can be done to avoid the overlap goes, we can</p>

<ul>
<li>participate in the Area 51 discussion</li>
<li>start some more organized effort of "try CV first"</li>
<li>add "data science" to the CV description</li>
<li>be accepting of less statistical data science questions (data cleaning, storage, ...)</li>
</ul>

<p>As a point of comparison, there are two math sites:</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://math.stackexchange.com/">Mathematics</a> "for people studying math at any level and professionals in related fields"</li>
<li><a href="https://mathoverflow.net/">MathOverflow</a> "for professional mathematicians"</li>
</ul>
