Is everybody allowed to post news items in the OpenStreetMap wiki?

Everybody can post fresh news items to appear in the news panel on the wiki Main Page. To help keep the news panel useful we need regular wiki edits from sensible people with good judgement. That applies across the whole wiki, but is particularly true here. The panel was added somewhat experimentally, and may be removed from the Main Page if it ceases to be useful. At the moment it seems to be working reasonably well.

You are encouraged to post news items which are important. This often means cross-posting information which has appeared in other channels such as the mailing lists

However you are also encouraged to think about not posting news items which are not important.

To add a fresh news item:

• Login/Register on the wiki
• On the Main Page click the little "+/-" link appearing next to the News heading.
• Add a new row to the wiki table just below where it says The easiest way to get the syntax right is copy & paste an existing row. Be sure to include the line containing "|-" which separates rows of the wiki table.
• Use the 'Preview' button to check it's OK before saving. The preview will appear a lot wider than the news panel on the Main Page, but you can at least check you have the table syntax right.

Entries should be should be kept short (around 10 words) in order to be short and snappy, like a newspaper headline, and also for screen space considerations on the main page. If your message is wrapping onto more than two lines there, it's too long.

Entries can, and probably should, include links to more information. These can be external links to blog posts or mailing list archives, but as with all wiki linking, an internal link to another wiki page should be used in preference if an appropriate wiki page is available (that page in turn would provide more external links)

Everybody can edit the Wiki-page. But only real news should be posted there.