Some "smaller" issues with Documentation Criteria
This discussion has an associated proposal. View Proposal Details here.Comments about this discussion:
Started
Under 2.1, it says
"An independent witness is someone who is not normally associated with, or related to the participant, and has no monetary gain from the record attempt."
"Related" probably refers to a family relationship, and sound reasonable.
I'm wondering what "normally associated with" means. In most cases, witnesses will have some assocation with the person they are witness for. They may be friends, club peers, riding buddies or the like. I would not exclude all those persons from being a witness. Who would be NOT associated with someone, and still be a witness?
I think we should just say
"An independent witness is someone who has no family relationship to the participant, and has no monetary gain from the record attempt.
Towards the bottom of the same page, it says
"The IUF reserves the right to use videos and photos submitted for publicity and promotional purposes without payment
or acknowledgement to the copyright owner of the material. Please ensure that the copyright owner signs an agreement
to this prior to submitting material."
Why does IUF reserve this right for itself? We may need the photo or video material for proof, but it seems unreasonable to me to use it for publicity without consent of the original owner, or even without acknowledging them.
I tend to think that we should drop this whole paragraph. If we want to use such material for publicity or promotional purposes, we should seek permission.
Comment
You are right, the 'not normally associated with' is vague and open to interpretation. I wonder if it is sufficient that they are not related (ie extended family) though...
Would we accept a witness who is a best/close friend of the rider attempting the world record?
In terms of the IUF rights- I think that was copied from Guinness, which are a publishing company. I think it would be good to have photos/videos that can be used by the IUF, but yes, it seems a bit harsh not to acknowledge the copyright holder. However, permission should be sought at the time, otherwise it may become a problem if we want to publish some photos years later and no longer able to contact the original owner.
Comment
I can see why we would want to exclude a best friend of a record claimant (not saying that we should). But then where would you draw the line? We cannot require that someone quantifies their friendship.
While it might come in handy to use such pictures (or vids), they were not supplied for that purpose and IUF (should) have no a priori rights to them. If only years later we find out that we want to use a picture and cannot contact the owner, it's just bad luck and we can't use that picture. If we foresee such future use for a specific picture, we can already seek permission at the time, but I wouldn't do that by default.
Comment
I agree with you totally Klaas!
Comment
I also could not say where to draw the line and therefore I think it would be more clear to demand that there is no family relationship.
Concerning the pictures, I completely agree with Klaas.
Comment
I was working on a proposal text, and got stuck with "family relationship".
Very distant family relationships don't need to be excluded, like if two people share their grand-grand-grand-grandparents. They might not even know, let alone that we know.
So I was thinking to exclude "first and second degree of relationship". That would cover parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. For me that is wide enough. However, a husband or spouse is not covered by this term. Still I would like to exclude a spouse from being an independent witness. Same probably for a sister-in-law etc. I could not find a widely accepted single term in English to delineate this group.
One way out would be to draw the circle closer, and only exclude first degree relationship and married partners from being independent witnesses. Would that be enough?
Thoughts?
Comment
For me first degree plus husband or partner or whatever is enough.
Comment
"Spouse and Immediate Family members" would be the appropriate English term. (Some would probably consider your spouse to be in your immediate family, but this text makes it explicitly clear.)
Comment
I like explicit clarity :-).
And there seems to be no disagreement that this is indeed the group of individuals to exclude. I'll go ahead.
Comment
I have created a proposal.
In it, I have used the term "claimant". I'm not sure if this has too strong a connotation with making a financial or juridical claim. Maybe it's just OK to use "claimant".
If not, what would be a better term? The old rule uses "participant" but that doesn't seem right either - I wouldn't say someone is 'participating' in a record attempt.
Comment
How about "prospective world record holder"? I agree that "claimant" is too much of a legal term.
Comment
"Partner" is better than "spouse" as so many long standing relationships do not end in marriage. Most legal documents seam to be going this way. I also prefer the word "claimant" to anything longer as it is so concise and clear.
Comment
"Spouse" is a well-defined term, whereas "partner" is not. Should "partners" live together? What if they live "half" together? What about someone's boyfriend/girlfriend? Etc.
"Claimant" is short indeed, and it may be clear in UK English. But it may not be clear in US English if there it is only used for someone behind a legal claim. (I don't know if it is.) That might be more confusing than clear.
What about using "rider"?
Comment
Partner is a legal term when it refers to relationships in the UK; but you are right, this may not be understood outside here and would cause problems.
I have just looked at some legal documents to see what they use; they use "close family member", does this make it clear?
"Claimant" works for me, but if it is not understood by others, then this is not a good word. "Applicant" is often used on forms. "Rider" does work for me in this instance. What ever we choose should be shown through all our documents though, consistency is good.
Comment
The problem both with "partner" and "close family member" is that these words have colloquial meanings that may be different from the legal term, and then again, the legal term has different meanings dependent on the particular jurisdiction one is in. Being the WORLD record committee, we need something that cannot be misunderstood.
From a little googling, it seems that "close family member" also includes aunts, uncles, nieces, grandparents, and more.
Also by googling, I found out that "immediate family member", as it is in the current proposal, means approximately the same thing. Unlike what Scott said, it also included grandparents, mothers in law, adopted half and step members etc.
So I think we should not rely on some umbrella phrase that is open to interpretation, but use an explicit list of those we want to exclude.
What about:
An independent witness cannot be the spouse, parent, child or sibling of the rider.
Comment
For me the wording sounds good, but as my English is not very good I prefer to leave the choice of terms to the native speakers.