Talk:Small Swords Society

Organizations

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Organizations, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Organizations on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

History

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject History, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the subject of History on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Military history: Asian / Chinese C‑class

	This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.
C	This article has been rated as C-class on the project's quality scale.
	This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-class status: Referencing and citation: criterion not met Coverage and accuracy: criterion met Structure: criterion met Grammar and style: criterion met Supporting materials: criterion met
Associated task forces: /  Asian military history task force Chinese military history task force

Contradiction

How could this society have been established in "about 1840" and "1850," as the current version of this article states? 173.88.246.138 (talk) 01:14, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

Especially when it was probably actually formed in 1853 according to most of Google Books' guys. — LlywelynII 09:58, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

The name...

The name ("Small Swords") refers to daggers used by warriors or martial artists in close combat. It is believed to be linked to [[Triad society|triads]].{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

This already had a [fact] tag on it but I'll just remove it since it's almost certainly wrong. 'Small Knife Society' is just a mistranslation based on the Chinese 101 vocab list that equates 刀 with the things that Chinese chefs have and that Westerners use with their forks. Really the 劎/刀 distinction is entirely alien to English and has nothing to do with relative size: some swords are jian and some are dao, based on the number of cutting edges they have. A) These guys had short swords or very very long knives (along with their guns and anything else they could get their hands on). They didn't default or train with 'daggers in close combat'. B) The actual base membership sign was their cap, red badge, and blue jacket and not any standardized weaponry. C) There was a later group with the same name who specifically took it from being lesser/younger than the Big Sword (dadao) Society and had nothing to do with machetes or knives at all. That was in the warlord era, though, so likely a separate group. Point being, this is universally the Small Sword/s Society; to the extent they had bladed weapons, they weren't daggers; they certainly weren't specially trained in them; and none of that should be left in the article without specific sourcing about how all of the above is wrong after all based on new/Chinese research. — LlywelynII 09:58, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

We should probably also move this to the grammatically correct Small Sword Society, too. Seems to be preferred by most of the scholars on the topic. — LlywelynII 10:01, 17 April 2023 (UTC)