For many years, we've done the news on the wiki using a rolling include page, that we added to the top, then took stuff off as it filled up. Later we used a MediaWiki extension called "DPL" to include the whole page (formerly this page name), and only show the newest (top) 3 items. This was incredibly tedious to post things. You can see the past years news at Category:News Archives.
We now use Wikia's "blog" system to do the news. Any admin may make a blog (hit Special:MyBlog), and add it to the category News (thats [[Category:News]]), and it will show up on the front page. That's it! You can see all news posts at Category:News.
This provides comments, no fragile format to manage, and no news archive pages with hundreds of edits to parse to only show a few items (read: makes the front page load faster). Enjoy!