While we were chatting on #openguides IRC, perigrin asked me and Bob why we find RGL useful. We came up with a lot of stuff, which I have summarised below. I thought this might be a good question for other guide admins/users to ask themselves. What do you like about your guide(s)? Why do you use them? I would be interested to hear your answers.
Bob uses RGL to keep track of known decent pubs. He also likes writing reviews as a means of procrastination :)
I use it: - to keep track of known decent pubs and restaurants - to help me find pubs near specific restaurants (for meeting in before dinner) - to note down the quirks of various Tube/rail stations; see e.g. http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Wimbledon_Station http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Green_Park_Station - as a quick reference for which central stations are served by specific outlying stations, to help me plan my journey when I'm visiting an unfamiliar area - to note down which dishes are the best ones in local takeaways - to find cafes and pubs that I can stop off at when I'm on a long walk - as somewhere central to keep links to reviews, forum posts, etc about a given place, so if I'm meeting someone somewhere I can just give them a single RGL link instead of three map links, two pub review site links, etc
In the past, I've used it to keep a list of restaurants I'd not visited but wanted to - but the list got too big so I stopped doing that because I didn't want RGL to have too many stub pages with no original content. This is basically because London's so big - I have no such qualms about the Cambridge guide, which I also have a hand in running.
I also just had an email this morning from a friend who says she's using RGL to help her explore her neighbourhood. She plans to visit a new place every week and write it up for RGL.
Kake