Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/National selections for the Eurovision Song Contest

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. voorts (talk/contributions) 04:05, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

National selections for the Eurovision Song Contest (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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While the national selections for the Eurovision Song Contest of each individual country may be considered notable, e.g. Melodifestivalen in Sweden or Melodi Grand Prix in Norway, and while I do believe there is scope for including information on individual country's selections within their own articles (see San Marino in the Eurovision Song Contest#Selection process for a good example of this), I do not believe that there is justification for hosting a list of every single national selection which may have been held. I believe that this article contravenes several of Wikipedia's guidelines, including WP:LISTCRIT, WP:NOTDIRECTORY (specifically point 2 on "lists or repositories of loosely associated topics"), and in parts I believe this also falls down on WP:GNG as well as WP:OR (given the vast majority of information here is unsourced). I propose deleting the article and merging any useful, sourced parts into Eurovision Song Contest and individual country articles. Sims2aholic8 (talk) 20:09, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Music, Television, Lists, and Europe. Sims2aholic8 (talk) 20:09, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: WP:NLIST says: "Lists that fulfill recognized informational, navigation, or development purposes often are kept regardless of any demonstrated notability.", and the set seems notable anyway; the informations are not ’loosely" associated. -My, oh my! (Mushy Yank) 08:59, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong keep. W/rt/ your statement thatI do not believe that there is justification for hosting a list of every single national selection which may have been held. It is inarguable that the Eurovision selection process has been given substantial attention by RS, and that therefore that this list meets WP:NLIST. Addressing arguments point by point:
  1. LISTCRIT: How is this list not specific enough for that to be a problem?
  2. NOTDIR: Again, this list is very specific, so no issue with "loosely associated topics"
  3. GNG: Relevant criterion is NLIST, which is met as per above (and arguably irrelevant anyhow per Mushy Yank)
  4. OR: I fail to see how this list has any problems with that, rather than WP:verifiability, to which I point to WP:NOTCLEANUP
  5. I propose deleting the article and merging any useful, sourced parts into Eurovision Song Contest and individual country articles. The high-level main Eurovision contest article would be far too unwieldy with all this information.
  Mach61 00:06, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I still think my counterarguments to the nom statement are correct, but participants below make good points, so I rescind my keep vote. Mach61 21:25, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete the table only. While selections are an important part of the Eurovision realm, this table/list format is not appropriate to convey that. The prose describing how entries are selected is all that is needed and in fact should be expanded as how entries were selected tends to be a point of discussion for the contest. I don't understand the point of the table. It is not user friendly, not accessible, and just serves as a dumping ground for unsourced information. Modern contests could have readily accessible refs, but the older ones are not as prevalent or accessible. That on its face is not the biggest issue, but rather every process is different depending on country, so grouping things by labels as just "national final" or "internal selection" is far too vague. Adding additional context would further create readability issues. Some select just a singer internally, some a song internally, some both the singer and the song internally; meanwhile some national finals have an open call for applicants, others have contestants that are internally selected, and yet still others have one singer they've selected singing singer multiple songs for consideration. If I want to see how a country selects their entry, I can navigate to their country's article (i.e. San Marino, Romania, etc.). There are far too many variables to present this information at this manufactured high level. Grk1011 (talk) 13:28, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  @Grk1011 Votes to the effect of "Keep under the condition that..." shouldn't be cast, since discussions about improving the article belong on the article talk page, not here. Mach61 17:20, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  Not exactly. If it's on the fence, I think the evidence presented leans more towards delete. There should be a place that discusses how entries are selected, but currently this article is not that in any meaningful way. The contest's website only discusses this with fewer than a dozen sentences, something which as of now could fully be part of the Eurovision Song Contest article without undue weight. Grk1011 (talk) 18:03, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  @Grk1011 I think you misunderstand the page. It is not a regular article about the selection process that happens to contain a large list, it is a list-class page of all the broadcasters each Eurovision participant uses for their national finals, that just so happens to have some explication of the process for context. I agree that the non-list conent could be merged into the main article easily enough, but the list is the entire point of the page. You ought to be voting "Delete" Mach61 19:22, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  That is why I !voted delete overall. The list is the worst part of this article for the reasons I listed above. This type of information is not properly conveyed in list form as it varies so much from country to country. Between the columns being misleading (there are more than just "national final" and "internal selection") and there being no way to compare country vs country via sort or quantity of any well-defined metric, I'm not sure what we're doing here. Grk1011 (talk) 13:32, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  @Sims2aholic8 Four of the six columns on the table (Country, debut and latest entry, broadcaster) show what ought to be pretty uncontreversial information, which means any country-to-country variance must be in cases where a year a competing country participated, they did not run either a clear internal selection or national final. May you give a specific example of that happening? To this non-Eurovision fan's eyes, all years seem to be neatly accounted for. Mach61 18:50, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  @Mach61: The four columns you listed are indeed uncontroversial, and are already listed in several other articles, e.g. Countries in the Eurovision Song Contest and History of the Eurovision Song Contest. The issue I find with the table for these two columns is that there is a lot of information which is unverified, and in some cases is usually based solely on rumour or fan sites, which causes an issue for WP:OR and WP:UGC. I also believe, as Grk1011 points out above, that it's somewhat reductive to say simply that a country chooses an entry either through a national final or an internal selection. There are multiple cases where hybrid approaches have been used, most often where an artist is chosen and the song is selected, like Greece 2017, but occasionally the opposite can be true, where a composer is signed on and writes a song and then an artist is selected, like the Netherlands 2010. There have also been many times where talent show formats have been used to find an artist, and then the song is selected internally, like Israel's HaKokhav HaBa. There is also the question around whether a televised national selection is open to any entries, and any interested artists or songwriters can submit a song, or whether the national broadcaster restricts the entries to only certain artists, or artists attached to certain labels, e.g. Greece 2014. Countries have also initially decided to go for one method and then decided later on to change this, e.g. Germany 2016, where an internally selected artist was dropped due to public backlash, and a national final was then held, or Greece 2004, when a talent show to select an artist was held, and the planned final to select a song was abandoned when the broadcaster decided to select a different artist.

  The point I'm trying to raise is that the current structure of this article does not allow for sufficient context to be conveyed about the exact method of selection used in each country in a given year. Absolutely I believe that information on Eurovision national selections has a place within Wikipedia, as there's no doubt with me that the process is considered notable. This is why individual country articles exist, to explain in better context how the selection processes worked in those years. However I question whether a separate article on this is required and whether relevant prose can be added to the main Eurovision Song Contest article instead, but if it's decided to retain the article without the table that would be a sufficient compromise. Sims2aholic8 (talk) 12:02, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  Updated my !vote to outright 'delete' given EurovisionLibrarian's views below. They're correct that say the table is gone, the remaining prose can be trimmed down quite a bit, resulting in an appropriate amount of material to be added/expanded at Eurovision Song Contest. Grk1011 (talk) 23:06, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:12, 31 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, asilvering (talk) 02:14, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. I agree that the table is the main problem and its use for readers is more than doubtful. It also doubles information already present in other country articles and therefore can quickly be outdated or contradict other articles if someone forgets to update it regularly (at the moment, the information on France 1956-59 and Austria 1957 is wrong, for example). If only the table is deleted, I'm afraid that the rest of the prose left is not enough to justify a standalone article: the information present in the two sections "National finals" and "Internal selections" is of little value, in my opinion. Most parts of it consist of enumerations of examples of various formats, and the rest is based solely on one subpage from eurovision.tv. In my opinion, a condensed version of the two prose sections could be integrated into the main Eurovision Song Contest article and this article be deleted. EurovisionLibrarian (talk) 20:54, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. I'm sorry for whoever made the table, but I agree with all the reasons given for deletion. I don't think it's worth maintaining a table with so many problems that need to be constantly updated, instead of focusing efforts on other areas that need improvement. Ferclopedio (talk) 14:11, 14 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.