Jump to content

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kamini Yacht Club

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kamini Yacht Club

[edit]

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

Kamini Yacht Club (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

My first thoughts as a yachtsman were "Is there a yacht club on Hydra at all? It's a small island. ... And if there is, why isn't the club in Hydra port, the main port? Which by itself isn't big. ... And if the club was established in 1956, why don't I remember Axel Jensen or Leonard Cohen mentioning it?"

Kamini is a picturesque village at 37°20′52″N 23°27′26″E / 37.3479°N 23.4571°E / 37.3479; 23.4571,[1] about 1 kilometre (0.62 miles) west of Hydra port. Judging by photos, the small fishing harbour has only room for 25-30 boats in the 3–10 metres (9.8–32.8 ft) range. With a max. depth of c. 2 metres (6.6 ft)[2] the harbour would offer mooring to only the smallest visiting yachts. Which in reality I don't think it does.

Let's look at the sources. There are zero Gbook sources that mention Kamini Yacht Club. For a club that was founded in 1956, and has "secondary clubhouses in London, England and Cornwall, England for overseas members", that is inconceivable. ("Secondary clubhouse in Cornwall", yeah, right!) The article was created in August 2009. Doing a time-restricted Google search for web sources dated before 1 January 2009, there are zero hits. All other later hits are mere regurgitations of the article. (On a side note, the burgee looks like something from a kids' beach party, and IP 86.163.152.57 was about right when the reduced the stub to saying "The Kamini Yacht Club is not a yacht club." (diff).)

This article looks like it deserves to be moved to Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia/Kamini Yacht Club, and with an age of 15 years, 2 months and 16 days also get an entry at Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia#Extant for 10+ years.

References

  1. ^ "Hydra Villages". Greekacom. 19 July 2008. Retrieved 2 November 2024.
  2. ^ "Apanemi Mansion hydra, Rooms to Let in Hydra". Αρχοντικό Apanemi hydra, Ενοικιαζόμενα Δωμάτια στην Ύδρα. Retrieved 2 November 2024.

P.S. Consider joining the November 2024 backlog drive at WP:URA and find gems like this. Sam Sailor 10:38, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Sports, Greece, and England. Sam Sailor 10:38, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete – even if not a hoax, this club would not meet WP:GNG. A nearly 70 year old international "organization" should have some searchable presence. This does not.--☾Loriendrew☽ ☏(ring-ring) 13:35, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy Delete, obviously. Good work by the nominator. RobinCarmody (talk) 18:49, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delete has sources like [1] but not notable since these are just mentions. Who am I? / Talk to me! / What have I done? 05:24, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment: Does not have sources. The "source" is from 2019. There are plenty of post-2009 non-RS that mention the Yacht Club. Sam Sailor 12:33, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    What I meant was that there are sources. Not RS Who am I? / Talk to me! / What have I done? 14:39, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to Hydra (island). The target page on Hydra now includes a mention of Kamini Yacht Club, citing sources including this 2024 article in the Express (Online/London) and this 2012 article in The Press in New Zealand. These are just mentions, so they don't help establish notability for the yacht club itself per WP:ORG or WP:GNG. There actually are other writers who mention Kamini Yacht Club, such as American ex-diplomat Don Feeney in his self-published memoir and it is also mentioned on this real estate website. Not a complete hoax, but likely includes original research which is unverifiable, and in any case there is not enough in-depth coverage to warrant a standalone Wikipedia article. Cielquiparle (talk) 08:45, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    It's possible the Kamini Yacht Club is actually more like a restaurant/clubhouse rather than an actual yacht club; the article in The Press mentions it in a paragraph about alleyways leading away from the actual port. Cielquiparle (talk) 08:46, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment: In regards to "The target page on Hydra (island) now includes a mention of Kamini Yacht Club": A mention of Kamini Yacht Club on Hydra (island) is nothing new. Hydra (island) has had a mention of Kamini Yacht Club since 2009 (diff) added by the creator of Kamini Yacht Club. That is standard modus operandi for validating a hoax and give the hoax incoming links, avoiding WP:O.
    I am concerned about the addition today to Hydra (island) of the sentence

    A popular yachting destination, Hydra is home to the Kamini Yacht Club, which welcomes tourists and sailors.

    as a statement of fact in Special:Diff/1255128149. It sounds more like paraphrasing a tourist guide than the formal WP:TONE expected in an encyclopædia. And unsurprisingly, the blurb is supported by two poor citations via ProQuest. One of them, the only one with a byline, is easy to find online:
    Wright, Emily (23 June 2024). "The beautiful underrated European island that is car-free and very walkable". Express.co.uk. Retrieved 3 November 2024.
    The only question one needs to ask oneself here is "Is Daily Express a RS?" And the answer is no, WP:DAILYEXPRESS: "The Daily Express is a tabloid with a number of similarities to the Daily Mail. It is considered generally unreliable."
    The other citation via Proquest does not include a byline, but the title "FELINE FIEFDOM" does not give me much hope that it is a quality source regarding Hydra.
    Both "sources" are post-2009. There is plenty of churnalism out there that mentions the Club. None before 2009, however, when the Kamini Yacht Club article was created. I will remove the addition made in Special:Diff/1255128149.
    The book by Don Feeney from 2014:
    Feeney, D. (2014). Gathering No Moss: Memoir of a Reluctant World Traveler. iUniverse. p. 350. ISBN 978-1-4917-3488-9. Retrieved 3 November 2024.
    is WP:SPS published by IUniverse, a notoriously unreliable publisher with no editorial oversight. We have had IUniveerse in edit filter 894 for years. Add a citation with publisher=IUniverse to an article an it will trigger MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-selfpublished in bright red. But it is quite amusing that Feeney writes as a statement of fact, "The Kamini Yacht Club welcomes ships from around the globe." Those "ships" would need to have a draught of less than 2 metres.
    In regards to "It's possible the Kamini Yacht Club is actually more like a restaurant/clubhouse rather than an actual yacht club": That is speculative nonsense. The fact alone that Kamini Yacht Club has no web presence at all should make any Wikipedian concerned about an article like this. The litmus test here is still to find high-quality, reliable sources that pre-dates our article from 2009. And there are none. Sam Sailor 12:33, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    No major objection from me: Just trying to make the point that it seems "something" called Kamini Yacht Club does appear to exist, even if it falls short of a yacht club in the classical sense. Even the lack of a web presence doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't or didn't exist. Cielquiparle (talk) 13:16, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Changing !vote to delete. While I'm not persuaded that an establishment called the Kamini Yacht Club never existed, in this case the source analysis by Sam Sailor is on the money because it seems quite likely that the Kamini Yacht Club no longer exists and is now known as Omilos Restaurant & Bar. (This is not something I would add to the encyclopedia, just outside research; more than the fact that a restaurant or yacht club didn't have a organisational web presence, it was the fact that it's not mentioned anywhere on TripAdvisor or Instagram, etc., that seemed suspect.) Regardless, the detail included in the current article is unverifiable and suspect (and should be removed) – one wonders if was actually the artist "commissioned" to design the burgee who might have been motivated to promote their website (I have already removed the embedded external link in the body text). @Sam Sailor: Good sleuthing and skepticism; it's just that your WP:HOAX assertion/theorisation/speculation that seemed a bit OTT (and I'm saying this as a hoax-hunting fan who has pleaded "hoax" in several AfDs myself; it often turns out that even if the article is "partly" a hoax and entirely deserving of deletion, it doesn't mean that there aren't facts in the mix that turn out to be true, which is why some bad articles manage to persist for so long). All in all, this is excellent work in helping to put a stop to perpetuating the propagation of incorrect information, which my edit on the target page would have done and which was rightly removed. Cielquiparle (talk) 14:10, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment: In regards to "... in this case the source analysis by Sam Sailor is on the money because it seems quite likely that the Kamini Yacht Club no longer exists and is now known as Omilos Restaurant & Bar":
    No, it does not "seem quite likely". Not even remotely likely. Both the editor and the Californian tourist are wrong.
    1. First, it's a tourist's photo caption from Flickr. No serious Wikipedian would assume the tourist got it right. And he did not.
    2. Secondly, his caption reads, quote: "The Hydra Yacht Club at right (now the Omilos Restaurant & Bar)". How the editor above twists that caption into "The Kamini Yacht Club no longer exists and is now known as Omilos Restaurant & Bar" is a mystery.
    3. Compare the Flickr photo of Hydra port with the photo from Kamini on this page that I linked to in the nomination. Kamini and Hydra port are two different locations, as I also mention in the nomination, and distinctively different from each other.
    4. The Californian tourist is partly right: The building on the photo today houses a restaurant called Omilos.
    5. Anybody who visited Hydra in the 1960s, 70s or 80s, or who has a remote interest in the island's modern history, or who simply cares to open the link will know that the building used to house the legendary club Lagoudera (Greek: Λαγουδέρα). The Studio 54 of Hydra.
    6. Prior to Lagoudera opening in 1959, the building was used as a repair shop by the local fishermen. G*d knows where the tourist gets the "Hydra Yacht Club" from. I can't find any sources that confirms that it existed either.
    Sam Sailor 08:09, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    This is awesome. @Stephenbharrison Any interest in covering a possible hoax on a massive scale? Could the effort of an artist to promote his website have really convinced diplomats, travel writers, real estate agents, etc., that an entire yacht club existed where there was none? Cielquiparle (talk) 14:37, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for flagging, @Cielquiparle. I'm pretty busy at the moment writing a case study about Wikipedia and AI for Balsillie School of International Affairs, but I will look into this yacht club story just because I find it personally interesting. Stephenbharrison (talk) 16:04, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Sam Sailor The auto-translation of the Studio 54 article suggest there was a "Marine Club of Hydra" which owned the building and leased it to the proprietor of Lagoudera...and there's a photograph of a sign on the building that says "Lagoudera Marine Club" too. (That's neither here nor there but suggests the half-truth that the "yacht club" claim might have been based on / inspired by.) Cielquiparle (talk) 14:46, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Also...isn't it possible that:
    • Another establishment (e.g. "Kamini Yacht Club" or other) leased the building after Lagoudera in the 1980s...?
    • FYI – In some places it's actually quite commonplace to use names that don't correspond to specific locations – e.g., in London, Charing Cross Hospital is not in Charing Cross. So it's not unthinkable that a club or restaurant could have a name that didn't correspond to its exact location.
    • (On that note, I read "Hydra Yacht Club" to possibly mean "a yacht club" in Hydra, not necessarily its name. Regardless, agreed that these are not reliable sources... In any case I am more intrigued by your "hoax on a massive scale" thesis now...but would really like to see what an actual investigation turns up.)
    Cielquiparle (talk) 15:08, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy Delete, if anything the image looks like a decoration of an inflatable pool or something that a random guy took a photo of. I also encountered some suspicious articles in the drive, so I guess I'm forced to PROD at least one of them at this rate. ABG (Talk/Report any mistakes here) 01:02, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kamini_Yacht_Club&oldid=1255368979"