How did the relegation rule work?

[Halldor]

So, I've been going through the eurovision song contest as I usually do as part of my PED, and I started to wonder, how exactly did the relagation rule which occured from 1994-2003 work? At first it apparently was supposed to be the lowest ranked countries from the previous years were not able to compete next year, but later it says they changed it to the average score over the past 4 years, but how does that work? I made an excel sheet with the 1998 song contest as an example and since 6 countries were relegated, according to my calculations the countries should've been Russia, Denmark, Italy,Bosnia & Herzegovina, The Netherlands and Switzerland, but only 4 out of these were relegated, Netherlands and Switzerland weren't relegated, but instead Iceladn and Austria were, can someone explain this to me????

 

[escfreak]

At first it apparently was supposed to be the lowest ranked countries from the previous years were not able to compete next year, but later it says they changed it to the average score over the past 4 years, but how does that work?

They changed it to the average score over the past 5 years, so 1993 was included as well. Switzerland and the Netherlands did pretty well at the 1993 contest.