Wikidata:Property proposal/historic first

historic first

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Person

   Not done

Description	achievement or position held by subject as first of their social group
Represents	historic first (Q64510815)
Data type	Item
Domain	human (Q5)
Allowed values	value and all qualifier combined (except point in time/sourcing circumstances) should determine the historic first
Example 1	Wentworth Cheswell (Q7983013) → elected person (Q16060143) qualified with ethnic group (P172)=African Americans (Q49085), country (P17)=United States (Q30)
Example 2	Susanna M. Salter (Q3631124) → mayor (Q30185) qualified with sex or gender (P21)=female (Q6581072), country (P17)=United States (Q30)
Example 3	Karolina Widerström (Q4110625) → physician (Q39631) qualified with sex or gender (P21)=female (Q6581072), country of citizenship (P27)=Sweden (Q34)

Motivation

The idea is provide a way to model a historic first (Q64510815), especially firsts for historically underrepresented social groups. The property statement is placed on a human's item, the value is their achievement or position, and qualifiers are used to specify the social circumstances under which they count as a "first". Note that while the first female prime minister of a country would of course be queryable by other means, as all prime ministers are notable on Wikidata, the same is not at all true for physicians and similar.Pharos (talk) 22:53, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Oppose I approve of the basic idea wholeheartedly, but I don't see anything near an actually functional implementation in the proposal. this sort of complex description is just not really possible in the Wikidata model IMO. It's likely that creating items with instance of (P31)historic first (Q64510815) (e.g. something titled "first election of an African-American to public office in the United States"), and linking those to the people through significant event (P793) is a more efficient approach. Circeus (talk) 18:29, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

  I don't believe creating many new items like "first election of an African-American to public office in the United States" would be at all scalable. Consider how many items we'd have to create just for "first licensed female physician in X place", for example, and the myriad other professions and positions. Not to mention that the second and third female physicians are often notable too, and this can also be expressed with qualifiers.--Pharos (talk) 16:18, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

•  Comment @Circeus, Pharos: I reformatted the samples a bit. Maybe it's a bit clearer now. I think they should be feasible. Supposedly, it could work also without any qualifier? Eve > historic first > female. --- Jura 13:21, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

  Yes, I think it could work without a qualifier. Just wanted to explain the harder and more common case first.--Pharos (talk) 16:18, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

•  Support I like this approach better then the significant event (P793) one. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 15:06, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
•  Comment maybe we should mention in the description that qualifiers (except "point in time" and sourcing circumstances) need to be read as cumulative conditions. --- Jura 15:14, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
•  Comment in the first sample, elected person (Q16060143) might be better than elective office (Q17279032), and country (P17) or applies to jurisdiction (P1001) than country of citizenship (P27). Supposedly an American could have be elected to an office in another country. --- Jura 15:14, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

  Agreed, these seem like reasonable changes to me.--Pharos (talk) 16:18, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

•  Oppose per Circeus. --Tinker Bell ★ ♥ 00:40, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
• @Pharos: are you still interested in this? If so, could you attempt to address the comments. --- Jura 13:19, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
•  Support @Pharos: I updated the proposal per discussion. --- Jura 14:52, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

•  Weak oppose I like the idea of being able to record this, and I think the revised proposal is pretty good, but I would still prefer using significant event (P793) and appropriate qualifiers. However, I don't think we would need to create a lot of single-use items as per Circeus's suggestion- we could combine the two approaches and use eg/ significant event (P793):first person, and qualifiers as above (ethnic group, gender, country) plus has characteristic (P1552):elected person (Q16060143) (or is there a better qualifier?).

The other reason for using significant event (P793) is that "historic first" is important, but so is "historic last" (albeit it's rarer). For example, Alessandro Moreschi (Q504969) is famous for being the last castrato musician, Teruo Nakamura (Q700512) was the last Japanese soldier to surrender (in 1974!), and there are quite a few items linked from w:Category:Last living survivors. There are also occasional cases where "only person" is notable, and it might not be appropriate to use "first" (since it's something not expected to happen again). I am sure there are other things we might want to treat as historic records in the same way. It also seems to be more appropriate to express things like "second person to do X" using significant event (P793) than by recording it under a property called "first".

Creating multiple different properties for last/only/etc is certainly possible, but it seems more straightforward to use significant event (P793) and then use an item to say first/last/only, with qualifiers to give the context as proposed above. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:38, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

• Good point. I think we should try to find a solution for "historic last" as well. @Pharos: what do you think?
  Creating new, likely unique, items for each in P793 doesn't seem practical, especially as then each item would need to include statements to provide the information in a structured way.
  A disadvantage of including a few general values in P793 could be that a separate way to read the qualifiers of such values is likely needed (and these may need to be excluded when trying to retrieve the others). --- Jura 07:26, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
• @Andrew_Gray: you make good points. Would you please show the modeling of what you propose to illustrate your points? --Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 13:09, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

•  Weak oppose Shouldn't we be able to discern historic firsts from the existing data? For example, doing a query for all African American mayors sorted by date? Adding these historic first properties seems like redundant work, plus, from my experience, claims of being "firsts" have a low rate of accuracy. I imagine this would lead to unnecessary edit wars in some cases. Kaldari (talk) 17:59, 6 December 2019 (UTC)
  • We can't do this as we don't know whether or not we have all African American mayors in our database. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:02, 6 December 2019 (UTC)
    • We will not have every mayor in a given country our database, and even more so we will not have every lawyer or physician. It is often the case that someone has a Wikipedia article in large part because they have been attributed a historic "first", and it's important this be reflected in Wikidata. Of course statements can and should have qualifiers, depending on their provenance and reliability.--Pharos (talk) 04:51, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
•  Comment Expressible with has characteristic (P1552) = earliest recorded instance (Q63971158) with qualifier of (P642) or subject has role (P2868), and further qualifiers to narrow the criteria – see e.g. Conrad Heyer (Q20859406) or Orville Wright (Q494455). The proposed property may be a bit cleaner though, as a matter of taste. Per Circeus and Andrew Gray, I hope we can reach a consensus for how to express this kind of information, whether the proposed property is it or not. Swpb (talk) 15:47, 27 December 2019 (UTC)
• It would be good to brainstorm on this once more .. --- Jura 09:56, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
• Another usecase "historic first purpose built early childhood education facility in ACT": https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q100000001&oldid=1303282509#P793 --- Jura 11:25, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Maybe this version is better: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q100000001&oldid=1303602530#P793 --- Jura 07:48, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
•  Comment Maybe this is a good problem for Abstract Wikipedia to fix. NMaia (talk) 01:55, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

 Not done Proposal clearly has problems, and there is evident opposition. JesseW (talk) 02:31, 12 March 2021 (UTC)