Meshwesh Keywords and Search Terms

[MarkusB]

While we're at it, wouldn't it be nice if lists also had named battles and famed commanders as keywords? In this way, one could search "Carrhae" and get Parthian and EIR, or search "Hannibal" and find (together with the aforementioned Hannibal in Italy, which ironically would also show up now) the elusive "Zama campaign" list...

[David Kuijt]

While we're at it, wouldn't it be nice if lists also had named battles and famed commanders as keywords? In this way, one could search "Carrhae" and get Parthian and EIR, or search "Hannibal" and find (together with the aforementioned Hannibal in Italy, which ironically would also show up now) the elusive "Zama campaign" list...

That's a cool idea. Sounds like a lot of work, though.

If someone (someone not ME) wants to create a list of 200-500 or so famous battles and send it to me, I'll enter them all. In almost all cases I should know who the two combatants are in Meshwesh army list terms. I've got too much stuff on my plate right now to be the lead investigator (the guy compiling and creating all the names) on this.

Another problem is this -- Qadesh or Kadesh? Both, I guess, but that bumps up the list of battle names.

[MarkusB]

That's a cool idea. Sounds like a lot of work, though.

To my eyes, building a database like 'vanilla' Meshwesh as it is now is already an heroic effort. Keyword-based improvements like tagging battles and generals can be done at a later stage... and gradually.

[David Kuijt]

To my eyes, building a database like 'vanilla' Meshwesh as it is now is already an heroic effort.

True 'dat. Well, not necessarily in the "we have muscles on our muscles" way, but it has been years of effort, and thousands of hours of work.

Keyword-based improvements like tagging battles and generals can be done at a later stage... and gradually.

True.

It has been our plan for a long time to eventually make it possible for individual players to insert links to their gamer pages in particular army lists. So you could put a link to your Tibetan army page in the Meshwesh Tibetan army links section.

That goal is still a long way off -- there are issues of spammers, dead links, and a huge raft of other complications. So it might not be that way for years yet. But it is a goal.

[David Kuijt]

In the Chinese names in Meshwesh we've made a concerted effort to use Pinyin rather than Wade-Giles. The reasons for this are obvious if you try to research anything online -- Wade-Giles is vastly less common on the modern internet, unless you're searching the scanned interior of publications from the 1950s and earlier. And the frequency-of-use disparity between the two systems will get only more clear in the future, as more and more resources get online and the modern system is Pinyin.

Should we have Wade-Giles names as search terms into Meshwesh? E.g., Hsiung-nu would get you a hit on Xiongnu (Pinyin)? Without all the diacritical marks and umlauts and stuff, I mean.

[Andreas Johansson]

If you do W-G, do include the apostrophes at least (if I search for chin, I want to find Jin, not Qin).

It would perhaps also be worthwhile to include a few weirdo transliterations from the WRG lists. I have no idea what transliterations turns pinyin Jin into "Tsin" in the Spring and Autumn list and "Ts'in" in the Three Kingdoms and Western Ts'in lists, but wargamers might be looking for them under those spellings.

Speaking of obscurish Chinese dynasties, I just noticed that "Wei" finds neither the Three Kingdoms list nor the Northern Dynasties one. The sames goes for most dynasties/states subsumed under wider groupings. Not high priority, but would be nice if they were eventually added. (Haven't you always needed a Former Zhao army anyway?)

[Pavane]

You would think that using a pseudo-phonetic Soundex search would help with spelling problems so that "Chin", "Jin" and "Qin" queries would include the same results. Unfortunately it is based on the premise that an English speaker would at least get the first letter of the name right, so the first letter is retained and the coding is done on the remaining letters. Reverse-Soundex, where the last letter is retained would work though.

[Andreas Johansson]

"Japanese" should find the various "Samurai" lists from AD 900 on.

(Act'ly, I'd think it preferable to rename them as "Kamakura Japanese" etc. and have "samurai" as a keyword. You'd have to do something marginally clever with "Early Samurai", of course, since there's already an "Early Japanese" list. People sometimes call them "Early Samurai Japanese", so you could adopt that, or "Middle Heian Japanese" if you want something more scholarly.)

(While being parenthetical, it's somewhat confusing that the "Kamakura" list begins in 1020 - that is, 165 years before the Kamakura period starts. The end date doesn't agree with the formal end of the period either, but the discrepancy here is a mere 33 years.)

[David Kuijt]

"Japanese" should find the various "Samurai" lists from AD 900 on.

Right; I've been doing that (and similar for Chinese, Korean, and other places/cultures).

(Act'ly, I'd think it preferable to rename them as "Kamakura Japanese" etc. and have "samurai" as a keyword. You'd have to do something marginally clever with "Early Samurai", of course, since there's already an "Early Japanese" list. People sometimes call them "Early Samurai Japanese", so you could adopt that, or "Middle Heian Japanese" if you want something more scholarly.)

(While being parenthetical, it's somewhat confusing that the "Kamakura" list begins in 1020 - that is, 165 years before the Kamakura period starts. The end date doesn't agree with the formal end of the period either, but the discrepancy here is a mere 33 years.)

I'm not really happy with the current names, but I'm not sure what you're recommending above either. None of the period names seems to coincide well with the military changes we're trying to reflect in the army lists. I sure would like to avoid "Pre-Mongol Samurai." Maybe Later Heian and Kamakura Japanese for the 1020 to 1300 list?

[Andreas Johansson]

Maybe Later Heian and Kamakura Japanese for the 1020 to 1300 list?

Sounds reasonable to me.