Tier 0 — official
eurovision.com (EBU), BNT
One report publishes immediately.
These are the bodies that actually make the decisions. If the EBU says a country is in, it is in.
Method
how we decide something is true
This site updates itself. That only works if the rules for publishing are strict, public, and boring. Here they are.
Source tiers
Tier 1 — established press
Eurovoix, ESCXTRA, ESCToday, Wiwibloggs, Eurovisionworld, ESCBubble, Aussievision, ESCSpot
Two independent outlets required.
Reliable, but they break stories from the same briefings. One outlet alone is not enough.
Tier 2 — corroboration only
Wikipedia, and outlets with a mixed accuracy record
Never publishes on its own, at any volume.
Wikipedia is the richest structured source we have and is also editable by anyone. It can raise our confidence in something; it can never be the reason we publish.
What “independent” means
Eurovision outlets republish each other within minutes. A naive “two sources” rule is really a “one source, counted twice” rule. Every signal we record carries the outlet it came from, and sources that syndicate one another are grouped together — so a single story spreading across five sites still counts as one.
One outlet plus a matching Wikipedia edit does not clear the bar either. Fan outlets are a primary source for Wikipedia editors, so that “second” source is frequently the first one laundered through an edit.
What we refuse to do
- Invent precision. The EBU has not published contest dates or a venue. Where a fact is unknown, this site says “to be announced” rather than showing a confident-looking guess.
- Publish rumours as fact. Hedged reporting — “reportedly”, “expected to”, “in talks”, bids and shortlists — is recorded but can never trigger a status change.
- Let a model write the facts. Article text is assembled from database fields with known provenance. Language models are used for social captions, where the tone is the point and the facts are already fixed.
Corrections
Automation gets things wrong. If you spot an error, tell us and we will fix it and say what happened on the corrections page. Every country page shows how many sources back its status and when it last changed.