User:RoySmith/essays/First is worst

"Use of 'first' in hooks should be deprecated."

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 refer to an enumerable set of things, and those which refer to things which can't be enumerated.

Enumerable is just fancy 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. We know that because there was a crap-ton of media coverage while it was happening and it's such a difficult thing to pull off, we can be quite confident nobody else has ever done it. Well, at least without resorting to conspiracy theories. And once we've got the list of 12, it's trivial to sort them in chronological order and observe that Armstrong sorts to the beginning of the list.

As another example, "1988 was the first time Jamaica competed in the Olympic bobsled competition". This is a bigger set than the number of 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 of every event. So we could easily sit down and list every entrant in Olympic bobsled events and point to the first one from Jamaica.

Or "Julia Figueredo was the first indigenous woman to be elected president of La Paz's parliamentary delegation". Again, there's an enumerable set of people who have been president of this delegation, and we can assume there have been reliable records kept. So it's easy to go through them all, find which of them were indigenous women, and which of those was the first. One could quibble that there may not be clear criteria for who is a woman or who is indigenous, but lacking any evidence to the contrary, it's reasonable to assume we can identify all the indigenous women from the set of presidents.

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 in Lower Slobbovia ran a 4 minute mile in 1843 but nobody was there with a stopwatch to record their time. But that's such an unlikely even 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. Assuming we could come up with some clear criteria for what constitutes a pub. 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.

Another recent example: "the first Jewish newspaper was established in 1686 in Amsterdam". 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.