Happy Christmas and new year from WikiProject Eurovision.
This is the second edition of the newsletter to be in a bimonthly format. This will probably continue at least up until the next Eurovision Song Contest when the project is more active.
Editors are reminded that some articles covered by WikiProject Eurovision are subject to the biographies of living persons policy. This does not just include biography articles such as Alexander Rybak, but any article with material related to living persons. Such information is highly sensitive, and unsourced or poorly sourced material about living persons must be removed immediately. Material which may seen trivial to editors, such as a false claim of participation in a contest, can potentially be highly sensitive to the living persons involved.
Eurovision articles on this project have been repeatedly subject to a form of sneaky vandalism. This involves unregistered users adding false information to articles such as Eurovision Song Contest 2010 (while unprotected). These false claims are then made to look legitimate through the use of "fake references" with false titles and links, example. Cuchufleta (talk·contribs) was blocked indefinitely for creating multiple hoax articles with the same editing technique. Editors are advised to look out for further disruption of this kind, as it seems to be originating from a determined individial or an organised group. More information can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Eurovision#User:Cuchufleta.
Eurovision News
The EBU released their participants list for the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest on 31 December 2009. 39 countries will take part. Five of these qualify directly to the final, with the 34 remaining countries each competing in one of two semi-finals (seventeen per semi-final).
Five countries have declared they will be withdrawing from the contest in 2010. The Czech Republic are withdrawing due to three semi-final failures and a lack of interest from Czech viewers. Andorra, Hungary, Lithuania, and Montenegro have all declared they are withdrawing for financial reasons.
Georgia is the only country that has declared it will be returning to the contest.
No debuts are planned either with Liechtenstein's only broadcaster 1FLTV having ruled out joining the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) for December 2009. This made a debut by the country for the 2010 Contest no longer possible.
Despite the 2010 Contest being many months away countries are now actively declaring which artists and songs will be representing them at the contest. A table for this can be found at Eurovision Song Contest 2010#Participants. Nearly all of the declared participants now have dedicated entry articles.
Welcome to the fifteenth edition of the WikiProject Eurovision Newsletter!
Another decade has past for the Eurovision Song Contest. The naughties will probably be remembered as a decade of both success and controversy for the contest.
Televoting reached its peak in the early 2000s. This gave the contest a more democratic edge, but by 2008 it was widely believed to have made Eurovision resemble a political and geographic football match rather than a song contest. The EBU took action in 2009 by reducing televoting to having only a 50% weighting in the results of each contest.
Many new countries have joined the contest in the last decade, bringing the number of participants to a new high. Among this some countries withdrew while others returned, though one of the major missing countries, Italy, did not make a return as was hoped by many.
There was not a shortage of controversy either. Two participants went to war, and the buzz over the planned participation of Kosovo put Eurovision in the middle of a political storm. One also cannot forget that this decade saw the introduction of two spin-off contests - the Junior Eurovision Song Contest and the Eurovision Dance Contest. It is still not fully clear on how these fit into this project, perhaps we will work that out during the tens.
