Welcome to the Wikinews tour for newcomers! This page is intended to help new users get a jump-start contributing to the project. It may seem overwhelming at first, but it's not difficult to learn the ropes with a little practice - and it can be quite satisfying to see an article you've written yourself listed on our front page and Google News' index.
Like our mission statement says, we're a collaborative citizen-journalist news source that creates free, high-quality and unbiased news material that can be freely reused, as an alternative to mainstream sources such as BBC, the Associated Press, etc.
For the purposes of this tour, we'll assume that you've registered an account and are logged in. While you can still write articles and do most other basic editing activities without an account, having one gives you additional tools and options, such as the ability to enable useful editing widgets or change the interface's look in your preferences. Plus, it'll hide your IP address from public view.
