How should a new user navigate Cross Validated to learn more about statistics?

Question

(Inspired by this question, I thought it might be worthwhile to post a guide for those who just want to read and learn.)

What are the best ways for someone new to Cross Validated to sift through the volume of posts here and learn about statistics?

Answer 1

One way to use this site is just to learn more about statistics in general, and you might want to peruse the best of Cross Validated.

• An easy way to dip your toe into the water is each day to simply scan the list of recent badges that runs along the right side of the main page about half-way down. You can click on badges for Nice Answer or Nice Question, and navigate to that specific thread and read it. The Good Answer, Enlightened, Guru, Good Question, etc., are less common, but work similarly. The popularity driven tags, based on page views (Popular Question, Notable Question, Famous Question) or favorite votes (Favorite Question, Stellar Question), are more of a mixed bag, but are also worth exploring.
• You can also use the links above and just work your way through the lists systematically from the beginning.

You might notice that certain individual CV contributors reliably provide useful and informative posts, and you might want to specifically go through their contributions.

• The first thing to try is to click on users, and find that individual's userpage. Once there, you can click on "Answers" (to get a list of all the answers they've posted here), or "Questions" (for all their questions), and start reading. You may want to sort them by "Votes", in case they aren't already, so that you can work your way down from their 'greatest hits'. Unfortunately, it's hard to discern which posts that person might themselves think of as their best, but vote totals can be a reasonable proxy.
• Note that you can also officially follow a user: At the bottom right corner of each user's userpage, there is a link for an RSS feed for that user's posts.

Another approach is to try to learn more about a particular topic (for example cluster analyses).

• The most basic strategy is to click on tags, and find the tag for clustering. If you click on that you will get a list of all questions that have ever been asked on CV with that tag appended. Note that you can sort this list by clicking on votes (for the most highly voted questions), or newest (for most recent), etc. (The vote totals for questions will be loosely correlated with the quality of information that exists in that thread, or at least I have advocated such an approach to upvoting questions here.) You could also sort these using CV's search options (click the link that says "advanced search tips" beside the search button) to get, for instance, only those questions that have answers.
• You can blend the above two strategies as well, by navigating to the page for the tag and clicking on info. There you'll find a brief introduction to the topic in the form of a tag wiki excerpt, and the full tag wiki. Running down the right side of the page, you'll see a list of the CV users who have contributed the most under that category. By clicking more, you'll get a great deal of information, and you can click on the number beside a user's username and get a list of all the answers that user has posted on that topic. A slightly different variant is to go to the userpage of someone whose posts you've found helpful, clicking on "Tags", finding the tag in question (e.g., clustering) and clicking on it. This will give you a list of every post that user has written that was categorized with that tag.

Welcome to Cross Validated, and happy hunting! (Be warned, it's easy to wind up spending a lot of time here... )