diff --git a/doc/news/version_1.5.mdwn b/doc/news/version_1.5.mdwn
deleted file mode 100644
index d78bd5779..000000000
--- a/doc/news/version_1.5.mdwn
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,35 +0,0 @@
-ikiwiki now features support for [[Git]]!
-
-ikiwiki 1.5 released with these changes:
-
-   * Add --timeformat config option to allow changing how dates are displayed.
-     Note that as a side effect, dates will now be displayed using the local
-     timezone, not as GMT.
-   * More security review.
-   * Patch from Dr. Zini to add link() and backlink() to globlists. This allows
-     for some handy stuff like:
-     - Using links as a kind of tag; creating blog pages that list all pages
-       containing a given tag/link or not containing some other tag.
-     - Subscribing to mail notifications whenever a change is made to a page
-       that is a backlink of page foo. Ie, "Please notify me of changes in all
-       pages that link to my home page in the wiki"
-     - Locking any pages that are linked to from a particular page, so that
-       lists of locks can be exposed in the wiki.
-   * Reorganised the doc wiki's todo/* pages, using a link/tag to flag
-     when a todo item is done, instead of the previous moving it to a different
-     subdir.
-   * Allow pagetemplate plugins to override *anything* in the template.
-   * Add a meta plugin, which allows specifying various metadata about pages,
-     like license and author. It also allows for inserting html link and meta
-     tags into html, overriding the title, and adding hidden WikiLinks, which
-     can be useful when using link-based globbing for page categorisation.
-   * Remove preprocessor directives from inlined pages.
-   * Allow simple preprocessor directive values to be specified w/o quotes.
-   * Add support for using git instead of subversion as the RCS backend,
-     tremendous thanks to Recai Oktaş for this.
-   * Doc updates for git.
-   * Fix absolute url munging in rss generation to support https, ftp, etc urls
-     not just http urls.
-   * Patch from Recai Oktaş to improve utf-8 support, it should now use proper
-     utf-8 for edit and other fields, and for recentchanges. There may still
-     be utf-8 issues with the preferences page though.
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diff --git a/doc/news/version_1.8.mdwn b/doc/news/version_1.8.mdwn
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..be082f326
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/news/version_1.8.mdwn
@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+ikiwiki 1.8 released with these changes:
+
+   * Fix orphans plugin to not count a link to a nonexistant page as a reason
+     for a page not being an orphan.
+   * Support pinging services such as Technorati using XML-RPC to notify them
+     about changes to rss feeds.
+   * Parse svn log as xml for improved utf8 and security. Note that this makes
+     ikiwiki depend on XML::Simple. Patch by Faidon Liambotis.
+   * POSIX::strftime doesn't know about encodings and doesn't return a utf8
+     flagged string even if the locale causes it to generate utf8 output,
+     so make sure to let perl know it should be handled as utf8. Also,
+     the optimised version used for standard time formats won't work if the
+     user has changed locale, so drop it. Thanks, Faidon Liambotis.
+   * Fix re-encoding of the comments field to utf8 if a commit fails
+     due to a conflict. Thanks, Faidon Liambotis.
+   * Let svn know that commits have utf8 commit messages. Thanks, Faidon
+     Liambotis.
+   * Add insane double encode/decode to utf8 around call to markdown.
+     This works around a truely strange bug, which is apparently a bug in
+     perl, #376329. Also added a test case for it.
+   * Improve layout of edit page so formatting help link is always visible w/o
+     getting in the way of the preview.
+   * Centralised all calls to HTML::Template and force all the templates
+     to be read as utf8.
+   * Support pages with utf8 filenames. Patch by Faidon Liambotis.
+   * Introduce add\_plugins and disable\_plugins config options in setup files.
+     This allows adding or removing plugins w/o overriding the whole list of
+     default plugins, which makes it easier to upgrade when new default plugins
+     are added.
+   * Support htmlize plugins and make mdwn one such plugin, which is enabled by
+     default (of course!). Based on a patch by Faidon Liambotis.
+   * Add a html plugin, which can be used to write wikis in raw html,
+     if you'd ever want to do such a thing. Slightly tricky, since ikiwiki
+     defaults to not processing .html files, since w/o this plugin they would
+     be copied unsanitised. With this plugin, it will process and html
+     sanitise them, like any other page type.
+   * Rebuilding wrappers is necessary on upgrade to this version.
+   * Make ikiwiki --setup --refresh rebuild wrappers, so wrapper rebuild
+     will be automatically done on all upgrades.
+   * Don't send pings if the wiki is being rebuilt.
+   * Work around very innefficient behavior in File::Spec::abs2rel. Result
+     is a savings of 2 pointless fork/execs per link calculation, which
+     results in ~25% speedup of ikiwiki building its own doc wiki, and
+     about 35% speedup displaying RecentChanges!
+   * Make RecentChanges use a table and some CSS, should be much more readable.
+     No code changes involved.
+   * Encode & in diffurl in examples, to conform to pedantic rules.
+   * Speed up RecentChanges by another 40% or so with some memoization.
+   * Memoize abs2rel, which is still kinda slow, for another 30% speedup
+     in time to build the doc wiki.
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