# Talk:Eurovision Song Contest

The entire first section is written without notes or sources.  It includes claims that could be controversial (political criticism of the contest) as well as numerous hard facts that require verification. Archanglican (talk) 00:28, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

By "first section" do you mean the lead? Per WP:LEAD, and specifically MOS:LEADCITE, as long as the information contained within the lead is also in the body, and is cited there, then there is no need to add additional sources to the lead. If you see anything within the lead that you believe does not conform to this guidance then please let me know. Sims2aholic8 (talk) 10:11, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Change the map of "Participants in the Eurovision Song Contest, coloured by decade of debut" to use a color-accessible sequential categorized palette (https://at.mo.gov/wp-content/uploads/data-viz-accessible-color-palette.pdf). Proposed new map attached. This will give readers an immediate sense of when various countries entered the competition without having to reference the key repeatedly and improve accessibility for color-impaired readers.

Sunubit (talk) 19:23, 30 May 2025 (UTC)
 Done I can see no drawbacks and plenty of benefits to the replacement. Thanks for doing the work. DrOrinScrivello (talk) 16:33, 5 June 2025 (UTC)
Why is Northern Ireland colorless? Ferclopedio (talk) 18:06, 5 June 2025 (UTC)
Good catch. I attempted to verify everything before I made the change, but apparently missed that. A correct, less-accessible chart is better than an incorrect accessible one, so I'm going to self-revert; Sunubit, feel free to ping me if you make the correction and I'll put it back in. DrOrinScrivello (talk) 20:42, 5 June 2025 (UTC)
Good catch! I'll update this to fix that issue and resubmit. Thanks for the feedback, and very reasonable to revert for now of course. Sunubit (talk) 23:08, 5 June 2025 (UTC)
Please, check also what happened with the Netherlands. Ferclopedio (talk) 23:12, 5 June 2025 (UTC)
Thanks all - looks like the NL didn't render correctly. Corrected this, and also corrected the coloring on Northern Ireland to reflect the 1950s category. Resubmitting with these edits. Great catch, all. Sunubit (talk) 19:04, 6 June 2025 (UTC)
 Done It's back in there, thanks. DrOrinScrivello (talk) 20:14, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Hi. User Opheliascarlet has recently added to the article the claim that "The only performance to feature live instrumentation after 1998 was that of Lucio Corsi [...] This was permitted as the contest rules only disallow "plugging in of instruments to play live on stage", but not performance of instruments into the same microphones used for vocals". I turned that statement into a note, as it is an unbalanced piece of information in the paragraph as a whole. But in doing this, I stopped to think about whether that claim is true, and even if it's referenced, if there isn't another example that contradicts it, and the entire sentence should be removed.
At least I know of one other example of an unplugged instrument that played on stage into the vocal microphone: the toy guitar of Rodolfo Chikilicuatre. The truth is that the guitar played with just the push of a button and the melody sounded regardless of the subsequent keys he pressed (I have refs for this). So, the melody wasn't actually "played live" by him, but by the guitar itself (after he pushed a key). However, the melody wasn't on the backing track and it sounded directly from the toy guitar into the vocal microphone. So it's an example of an unplugged instrument that sounded live on stage directly to the vocal microphone, what I'm not so clear about is whether it can be considered an instrument actually "played live".
With this example I want to question whether there really hasn't been any other instrument played live on stage since 1998 to support that claim. There really hasn't been a single percussion instrument, or a mouth instrument, a battle horn, or a kvinnaböske, that has been played live on stage in all these years? It seems strange to me with all the joke entries we've had. Does anyone remember any? Ferclopedio (talk) 10:22, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Nobody? :( Ferclopedio (talk) 11:58, 13 July 2025 (UTC)
We don't really need to go into this level of detail on the main article anyway; this is more a subject that should be mentioned at Rules of the Eurovision Song Contest. I've reworded this section to remove any ambiguity about what the rules are presently, and keeping this paragraph only related to changes up to 1999. Sims2aholic8 (talk) 13:41, 13 July 2025 (UTC)
Agree. thanks. Ferclopedio (talk) 13:58, 13 July 2025 (UTC)