User:BigHaz/Eurovision

Introduction

The following is largely a rehash of arguments I've made at the DYK suggestions list, on my Talk page and at the ESC project. Obviously two of those places are relatively high-traffic, so people tend to miss them. In a broader sense, this essay also addresses the perception that DYK is "biased" towards certain sorts of articles.

As many editors are aware, my current Big Project (which has been going since about the middle of 2006) is to write entries on all competing Eurovision Song Contest entries. There are slightly more than 1000 of these, and every year in earlyish May another 30-odd (I believe the number in 2007 is 39) are performed. It sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but the project is humming along rather well.

So why do it?

For a number of reasons. First and foremost, I'm a fan of the ESC. Yes, for some reason or another I can't get enough of the appalling music, the cliched lyrics, the peculiar dancing and the mindless banter that goes on at the Contest. Don't ask why. I don't. Thus, creating articles on ESC entries is as logical to me as creating articles on types of plant if I were a horticulturalist. Much as we like to pretend otherwise, Wikipedia is still a hobby for most of us, and we can really only write well on what we're already interested in. The genius of the site is bringing together horticulturalists, ESC fans, military historians and economists and getting them all to contribute to something which looks vaguely like an encyclopedia. But I digress.

Secondly, I like systematised things. When I first came upon the ESC coverage here, it was all over the place. Perhaps 50% of the winning songs had articles, and perhaps 65% of them actually marked them clearly as being winning songs. Aside from that, there were a number of relatively well-known songs which had started life on the ESC stage which had articles - again, generally omitting that fact. Patently, this was not a systematic collection of information. What I've done, and what I will continue to do, is to systematise it. Most of the articles which exist now have information on the composer, lyricist, score, language(s) and so on, as well as a brief rundown of the fate of the song. The ultimate goal will be for a user to be able to find out about any song from any year of the Contest.

But isn't that a massive project?

The scope of the project is huge, as I've said before. The point to remember, though, is that it has a big "front end" and a small "back end". At the outset, there were probably 950-odd pages to create. There will soon come a time when the only pages which need creation per year are the ones for that year's Contest. Even then, the numbers will be smaller, since the winning song invariably gets an article the moment it wins (I'm offline at this point, trying to avoid finding out the result) and some of the entries already end up with pages before I get there as well. Think of it like those brave souls who created articles on the countries of the world back when Wikipedia was in its infancy - there are hundreds of countries in the world, but very few are created each year, so once the "front end" of the project was completed, the focus could move to maintenance of what was already there.

As a guide, by the way, I generally try to write 5 articles per day. Frequently, this equates to creating five pages per day, but in some situations it's a case of creating a couple of pages and bringing already-existing ones up to speed. The exact speed at which the articles are written varies.

So what about the DYKs?

As part of the creation process, I was introduced to the Did You Know process. Simply put, ESC entries are almost tailor-made for the requirements of DYK.

Why so? Well, firstly they're discrete pieces of information. The song has personnel associated with it, a language in which it is sung, a performance and a result. Thus, once all of those pieces of information are present, the article is completed. Only very rarely have I been asked to expand a DYK nomination, and then only by a few words to get it over the limit.

Secondly, the sourcing is comparatively easy. Except in the more esoteric cases, I can find all the sources I need very rapidly. Thus, the article is ready-sourced by the time it turns up in the DYK queue. Those which require slightly more work can usually be done within 24 hours of the article's creation.

Thirdly, we must remember that the Contest is precisely that. Each one of the songs performed tries to achieve something unique to stick in the voters' (or jury's, back in the day) minds. People can and have performed with drag queens (or as drag queens), they've sung about unusual topics (hitch-hiking, the removal of the Berlin Wall), they've worn outlandish clothes, they've created controversy before the Contest, they've sung in made-up languages and they've introduced new styles of music to the traditionally conservative Contest. That's before we even start to look at the memorable firsts, lasts and accidents which befall the entrants.

My goal, on general principles, is to try to nominate one song for DYK per country. Whether or not it turns up on the front page is out of my hands.

But...

And yet, not all entries make it to DYK.

A great many of them are songs which I know very little about, aside from the fact of their performance and their result. They simply never became as famous as they need to be to generate enough copy for a DYK appearance. There are some entire countries for which this is close to the case.

Others are interesting enough and significant enough to get a nomination, but they simply can't fetch up at the right length. That's happened at least once that I know of.

Still others are interesting to me, but not to the updating admins. I can't imagine why this is, but apparently it's true.

Others are just passed over, there being no rule that everything entered in the DYK suggestions needs to get listed.

A lot do, of course. But one must remember the restrictions.

Before I was made an admin, I had no say whatsoever in what nominations were taken. Even after the "Next Update" template was created, I deliberately avoided editing it because I didn't want there to seem as though there was a conflict of interest when I had a nomination going.

Now that I am an admin, I've already been in a situation where the template's needed to be updated and one of my nominations was up for grabs. I did not choose it, and I would repeat that decision in any other situation.

Most importantly, however, DYK can only be updated with what's there. In my own updating, I've noticed a large number of nominations about operatic history and the history of Romania (both of which are areas I can only asume were not well-covered beforehand). I don't mean to sound as though I'm complaining that nobody complains about an over-reliance on Romanian-history nominations, but it is important to remember that ESC isn't the only thing around. Besides, an ESC entry is most definitely not in every DYK update, and those who claim that that has ever been the case are ignorant of facts.

Finally, if people are going to complain about what gets put onto DYK, there's one simple solution - write other articles and improve existing stubs. That's what DYK is about.