User:RoySmith/essays/First is worst

Use of "first" in hooks should be deprecated.

Viriditas, Special:Diff/1192750200

At DYK, we often see hooks submitted which are some variation of "X was the first Y". Instead of "first", it might say "only", "biggest", "most expensive", etc. These are all examples of superlatives. Even when citing an otherwise reliable source, superlatives are often impossible to prove. Superlatives fall into one of two broad categories: those which are enumerable and those which aren't.

Enumerable is math-speak for "can be counted". There's lots of these, and they're generally not a problem. For example, "Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon". We can enumerate all the people who have ever done that. There are 12 and we can be quite confident nobody else has ever done it but we didn't notice. It's trivial to sort them and see that Armstrong was first.

As another example, "1988 was the first time Jamaica competed in the Olympic bobsled competition". "Olympic bobsledders" is a bigger set than "people who have walked on the Moon", but it's still enumerable. The olympics (at least in the modern era) have only been happening for a little over 100 years and excellent records have been kept. So we can list every entrant in Olympic bobsled events and find the first one from Jamaica.

Now lets consider, "Roger Bannister was the first person to run a 4 minute mile". This is a little harder to verify. There are no comprehensive records of every person who has run a mile. For all we know, somebody ran a 4 minute mile in 1843 but nobody was there with a stopwatch to record their time. But that's such an unlikely event that it's reasonable to assume it couldn't have happened. Technically, it might be more accurate to write, "Roger Bannister is the first person known to have run a 4 minute mile", but it would be silly to insist on that.

Moving along, let's look at a more problematical example, which is in fact the example that prompted the writing of this essay: "The Chequers, Potters Bar was the only pub in the UK with traffic lights in its car park". In theory, you can enumerate all the pubs in the UK. There's a lot of them, but not an impossibly large number. There's 67 million people in the UK; if we assume one pub per 1000 people, there's only 67,000 pubs. In theory, you could ascertain in some reliable way whether each one has a traffic light in its car park, say by driving around to each one taking a look. But it's unlikely that anybody has actually done that. So a statement like this is essentially unverifiable.

Take "Der Beobachter an der Weichsel ... was the first Jewish newspaper". This is cited to what appears to be a Reliable source telling us it was founded in 1823, but we've also got "The Dinstagishe un Fraytagishe Kuranten was the earliest known Yiddish-language periodical", which apparently dates to 1686, so clearly the first statement is wrong. More than that, Jews have been around for thousands of years. It's likely that for most of that time, there's been some sort of journalism, most of which has vanished from the historical record. Even if we limit ourselves to a modern definition of "newspaper", say after the invention of the printing press, it's unlikely that we have a comprehensive census of all Jewish newspapers that ever existed. So how can we be sure this one was the first?

Another good example is "Andrew J. Evans Jr. was the highest-ranking United States Air Force prisoner during the Korean War". There were a lot of prisoners during the war, but there are reasonably good records kept by the US military; it's possible that somebody listed as missing in action was actually taken prisoner, but that's an edge case. Reading the article, I see that he was indeed listed as MIA and it wasn't known he had been a prisoner until he was released. Still, it seems likely that if there was a higher-ranking officer held prisoner, we would know about it.