WWPA Certification
WWPA certification is a community-driven means of identifying respectable Weewar players.
WWPA members certify one another. When member A certifies member B, that means that member
A is making some statements about prior experience when playing Weewar with member B (see below).
More certified members certifying a given member M translates to a higher level of certification
for member M.
The higher the numeric level of certification a WWPA member has, the more confidence you
can have that the certified member meets and adheres to WWPA standards of sportsmanship and
fair play.
Certifications can be made or retracted at any time. Certification levels are calculated
using current certification data.
WWPA Certification Standards
(updated 2008-05-20)
If member A certifies member B, member A is stating:
- Friendly kicking.
B has never kicked A out of a game, OR B has kicked A out of a game and:
- B clearly communicated, either to A in particular, or to all of the game's participants in general, that B intends to kick
- Within 24 hours of the time of B's declaration of intent to kick, or the beginning of A's turn (whichever is later), A failed to provide a reasonable explanation for any delay in taking the turn
- No droning.
A has never witnessed B being or using a drone player. (A drone player being defined as
a player in a game being used to augment or benefit the in-game welfare or point rating
of another player with little to no regard for its own in-game welfare or rating.)
- No collusion.
A has never witnessed B participating in an undeclared alliance from the start of a game.
("Undeclared" meaning not clearly made known to all the game's participants.)
Certification Algorithm
Summary
- The system is analogous to a water flow system, with basins (members) and ducts (certs).
- More certs for you means a higher cert level.
- Your certification power (i.e. how much water you can give, or your outflow)
is limited by the cert power of people that certify you (i.e. your inflow).
- Therefore, a highly certified person (high inflow) has the power to
strongly certify many others. Conversely, a weakly certified person (low inflow)
can only certify others weakly.
- The more members you certify, the weaker your certification to others is
(you are spreading your water around more thinly).
- The numbers are entirely relative. There is no value which would mean "100% certified".
Details
Here are the nitty-gritty details of the certification system, for the technical types
who are curious. The system is essentially a basic
trust metric.
After all calculations are completed, every member has a certification rating,
which is a non-negative real number. As explained above, higher numbers mean stronger
certification (higher peer opinion).
To calculate, we begin by collecting verified members. Unverified members do not take
part in the certification system. Select one or more members to act as "seed members".
At present only Pistos is a seed member.
Map the members and certs onto a
graph,
with members as nodes, and certs as directed edges.
Assign the seed members a certification strength of 1.0.
Beginning with the seed members (in some arbitrary order), do a
breadth-first traversal
of the graph. For each member m visited, calculate his/her certification
level l[m] and certification strength s[m] as follows:
- Let P be the set of peers who have certified m and who have been visited in the traversal
- Let ncert be the number of certifications made by m
- l[m] = sum( s[p] ) for all p in P
- s[m] = l[m] / ncert
After doing a full traversal (visiting each member at most one time), calculate l[m]
and s[m] for the seed members.
The number shown in member listing is l[m]. Any member not
visited in the traversal is considered uncertified.