Meshwesh Keywords and Search Terms

[Andreas Johansson]

"Arab" should perhaps find the Abbasid lists. It does already find the Umayyad one, because that one's called "Umayyad Arab". There's a variety of latter Middle Eastern lists that arguably too should be found by that term, e.g. Caliphate of Baghdad.

For newbie-friendliness, maybe "Saracen" should find crusades-era Muslim lists, like Syrian and Fatimid?

[Andreas Johansson]

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.

Turns out that "Tsin" represents the École Française d'Extreme Orient system.

More helpfully, "Mithridatic" should find the "Mithradatic" list. Alternatively, since the spelling with i is an order of magnitude more common than the one with a online, the list should be Mithridatic with Mithradatic as a keyword.

[Andreas Johansson]

"German" should perhaps find the Konradin at Tagliacozzo list.

[Andreas Johansson]

"Sicilian" ought find the Siculo-Norman lists.

Speaking of which, "Siculo-Norman" should also find them. The database uses the (even more) obscure variant "Sicilio-Norman".

The Old Saxon, Frisian, etc list should be found by searching for the "etc" tribes, such as "Bavarian".

Similarly, it'd be nice if the Italian Hill Tribes list could be found by searching for tribal names like Ligurian.

(Obviously, this rabbit hole could be dug as deep as one cares - should "Berg" find the Feudal/Medieval/Renaissance German lists? - but in some cases these subsumed tribes have dedicated figure ranges, such as the Donnington Ligurians - at least those would be nice to catch as keywords.)

[David Kuijt]

Thanks for the pointers, Andreas.

(Obviously, this rabbit hole could be dug as deep as one cares - should "Berg" find the Feudal/Medieval/Renaissance German lists? - but in some cases these subsumed tribes have dedicated figure ranges, such as the Donnington Ligurians - at least those would be nice to catch as keywords.)

I've put Ligurian in.

As you say, this sort of task is one where we have to decide where the line of "good enough" ends, because there is no end to it. For "Early Hoplite Greek Other", for example, I've got the search terms "Syracuse Syracusan Argos Argive Corinth" but I could add 20 more names if I wished to. Since there are currently 650+ lists, spending an hour on each to determine search terms is simply impossible.

Right now we've got the relatively cruel but easy to implement method of "insert name when someone complains", which is much less work for me -- in essence, it is a way of crowd-sourcing the research for search terms.

[Andreas Johansson]

I was surprised to discover that "Scandinavian" doesn't find the Union of Kalmar list (sometimes known as the "Scandinavian Union" to wargamers). I might suggest it should find also Medieval Swedish and the Viking lists.

[Andreas Johansson]

"Armenian" should find the Tigranes list.

[David Kuijt]

I was surprised to discover that "Scandinavian" doesn't find the Union of Kalmar list (sometimes known as the "Scandinavian Union" to wargamers). I might suggest it should find also Medieval Swedish and the Viking lists.

Added, thanks.

Looking in similar ways, I added "Scotland" to search terms for Picts, Calendonians, Scots-Irish, Pre-Feudal Scots, and Scots Common.

[Andreas Johansson]

Looking in similar ways, I added "Scotland" to search terms for Picts, Calendonians, Scots-Irish, Pre-Feudal Scots, and Scots Common.

You might also want to add it to Scots Isles and Highlands.

[Andreas Johansson]

I suggested this in Vodnik's Cañari thread, but maybe it'll get more attention here: it would be nice if Cañari (with the tilde) found the relevant list - Meshwesh Americanizes the name as "Canari", and doesn't treat n and ñ as equivalent. So either add the Spanish version as a keyword, or get the search to strip out the diacritic.