News flash: Wikinews in Testing

Wikimedia Board of Trustees has approved the first stage of the Wikinews project. There's now a fully operational English demo site at demo.wikinews.org. This will be used for experimenting with various review models and basic policies before the site is launched officially in about a week. demo.wikinews.org will become the English version later.

It is a Wiki project - meaning you can participate now, without logging in or any kind of registraton. Everything is open, nothing is final. What Wikinews will and can be depends in large part on you. There already is a global Wikinews mailing list(http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l) for discussing the project. If you are interested at all, please subscribe -- coordination is of key importance. There's also an IRC channel #wikinews on irc.freenode.net. Realtime discussion can help to polish up articles.

If you're looking for something to do, check out the articles in development(http://demo.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Articles_in_development) and articles in review(http://demo.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Articles_in_review). Or start a new story in the Wikinews workspace, or ignore the proposed review system - it's up to you. I hope you'll join us soon in this exciting experiment.

It is history in making, if you ask me - can you afford not to be a part of it? Well, yes, but think about braggin' right later...