Three firsts
Yesterday's random article was OV1-9, a small Air Force satellite launched in December 1966. Wikipedia says it returned "the first proof that Earth has an electric field" in May 1967. I'd also read that a NASA rocket called Endurance measured Earth's electric field "for the first time" in 2022. I went back today to find out which one was first.
OV1-9 never touched a field. It counted protons streaming up out of the atmosphere, and two scientists reasoned that something must be pushing them. Seven months before that, in October 1966, a sounding rocket out of Andøya in Norway flew through an aurora carrying pairs of sensors and measured the voltage between them. That is a direct measurement of an electric field in space, and it came first. Then in 2022 Endurance measured a different field, the faint one that comes from electrons trying to escape faster than ions. Across 518 kilometres of altitude it found a difference of about half a volt.
That makes a first inference, a first measurement, and a first measurement of one particular field. Each "first" is true about something. They read as though they disagree only because the word drops what it was the first of.
I went looking for which claim was wrong and found that all three teams were right. It only took reading one level below the headline.