Revise 2D.2 Officials

This discussion has an associated proposal. View Proposal Details here.

Comments about this discussion:

Started 31 Aug 01:37

I realized that by adding more Judges to Chapter 2C, Section 2D.2 Officials should also be updated accordingly. I would therefore suggest to change the rule as follows. The proposal takes into account that theoretically there could be also only technical disciplines or only races and in these cases not all officials and judges are needed.

2D.2 Officials

1. The host shall designate the following officials for all track events:
    - Track Director
    - Referee
1.1 For races the following additional officials and judges shall be designated:
    - Starter
    - Timekeeper
    - Finish Line Judge
    - Lane Judge
1.2 For technical disciplines the following additional judges shall be designated:
    - Technical Disciplin Judge

Comment 31 Aug 04:42

I agree. You have a very good eye for consistency and structure of the rules!

Comment 01 Sep 03:45

One question which is not about the content of this proposal per se, but rather an English grammar thing.
In this proposal and also in others, I notice that "must" is often replaced by "shall". I'm not a native speaker, but to me "must" is actually clearer to describe a requirement. Who instigated this must/shall swap, and why?

Comment 01 Sep 10:10

> I'm not a native speaker, but to me "must" is actually clearer to describe a requirement. Who instigated this must/shall swap, and why?

I have always understood "shall" as the more formal version of "must" and know the use e.g. also from other rulebooks like that of athletics. Since in our Rulebook sometimes "shall" and sometimes "must" was used, I tried to make the whole thing uniform with the version "shall", which was more logical for me in the formal context of a Rulebook.

Comment 01 Sep 15:37

I was leaning toward agreeing with Jan, but as a native (American-) English speaker, I realize I do not know the difference so I decided to do some Googling (actually Duck Duck Go-ing). This page would seem to sum things up:
https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/conversational/shall-and-must/

Please note that this refers to "everyday conversation" and not specifically legal situations. But what better to use as examples to use than statements of regulations or requirements? This link provides some additional nuance:
https://langeek.co/en/grammar/course/694/shall-vs-must

So IMHO I believe we must stick to must, which implies the stronger obligation.

Comment 01 Sep 15:38

John seems to be the only native English speaker who is active in writing comments, although the member lists includes some more folks from the USA. Can John or anyone in the know comment on must versus shall? I wonder, BTW, if this is the same in British versus US English.

Note that in German, "soll" also indicates a requirement, AFAIK. It is closely related to Dutch "zal", but "zal" is a weaker form of requirement, maybe more like something that is expected rather than required. OTOH, "must" is related to Dutch "moet" (German "muss"), and indicates that this is enforced. This is probably why to me, as opposed to you (Jan), "must" sounds stricter, or at least clearer, than "shall". I might be totally wrong though.

Comment 01 Sep 15:40

You commented while I was typing my request for you to comment :-)

Comment 01 Sep 16:53

'Scuse Moi!

Comment 02 Sep 02:15

I am not a native speaker, so if John recommends us to use "must" instead of "shall", then we should create a separate proposal for that and change (all the modified) "shall" (back) to "must".
As I said, my impression that "shall" is the more formal version is based solely on the fact that e.g. in the WorldAthletics Rules (and other rulebooks like those of UCI, FINA, FIFA) "shall" is used much more often than "must". But if this is historically caused and there is just a rethinking and a change, what the example from John suggests, then we should of course also go ahead here.

Comment 03 Sep 00:23

I just did a "find" of the words shall and must throughout the current IUF Rulebook. Shall appears quite a lot, but must appears a great many times more than shall, possibly 10x. Taken as a whole, we're being inconsistent. Our compartmentalized method of making changes to the Rulebook means this is (mostly) not our problem. The Main Committee, where global-type changes would belong, has only two members and zero proposals. Connie and Kirsten are very hard-working IUF people, and I would not bug them with such as this; it can keep for a future round of edits.

For the Track section however, we could take a look at how they appear in there and base a proposal off that. My copies of the current Rulebook are only in PDF form. When I do searches (in Apple Preview) the search results jump from page to page in no logical pattern; you can tab through the whole page, but then it jumps to a completely different page. It's a pain. Back in the day I would have a copy in Word, which would show it all in order by page! But I've picked out the pages containing shall (18, 29, 42, 44) and, after a much longer bunch of tabbing, Must (26-36, 38, 40, 41, 44). That took almost an hour, and I'm done for the day with this proposal. :-P

Comment 03 Sep 02:48

If we agree that we want to replace all occurrences of "shall" in the track part with "must", I would simply write a general proposal for the track part without explicitly mentioning the occurrences. Especially because most of the occurrences of "shall" are in the proposals we voted on in this round of the Rulebook Committe.

Comment 03 Sep 07:06

Agreed to this course of action.

BTW, Acrobat Reader in Windows shows the occurrences of any search string in order of appearance, starting from the cursor position.

Comment 04 Sep 01:11

I think 'shall' is appropriate for things that aren't unclear if they don't say 'must'. For example, "The race shall be run in lanes as far as the nearer edge of the breakline where riders may leave their respective lanes. The breakline shall be an arced line marked after thefirst bend across all lanes other than lane 1." Or possibly use a different word, such as 'will' or 'is' for the examples above. It just sounds odd to say 'must' when we're describing the international Athletics rules for how to run an 800m race on an Athletics track.

Sorry to make it complicated. Otherwise I agree with the idea of a separate proposal for just this purpose.

Comment 04 Sep 04:09

John, I copied your comment to the "shall" vs. "must" discussion - I hope that's okay for you.

Comment 04 Sep 17:55

> BTW, Acrobat Reader in Windows shows the occurrences of any search string in order of appearance, starting from the cursor position.

Sheesh, I should have just downloaded that first! Ten points deducted for the (also free) Apple Preview... :-P