Thanks to Ilya Haykinson, there's now a web interface to our chat rooms:

http://www.tiredbrain.com/wikinews/irc/irc.cgi

If you've always thought about joining our real-time chat, this is an easy way for you to get connected without knowing anything about IRC. We have also reorganized the chat rooms a bit. There are now the following channels:

#wikinews - international discussion, coordination of global reporting

#wikinews-en - http://en.wikinews.org/ #wikinews-pl - http://pl.wikinews.org/ #de.wikinews - http://de.wikinews.org/

#de.wikinews.org still follows the old naming convention. FreeNode prefers the "project-subproject" convention.

I'm very happy with these developments. Already, there have been some interesting discussions on #wikinews about a global editorial policy for Wikinews, and a lot of exchanges between the Polish and English communities. I hope that more people from the other editions will join the international chat room on a regular basis.

If you intend to use the chat, please add yourself to the list at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/IRC so we have an idea who comes from which region.

All best,

Erik