How this site works
A neutral, sourced explanation of Malaysian politics, written for a first-time voter catching up before GE16. This page is the method behind it — how claims get here, and what the labels on them mean.
the idea
Malaysia has excellent election data (ElectionData.MY has every seat since 1955) and plenty of news. What is hard to find is the layer in between: a readable, neutral account of how we got here and how the system actually works. That is the whole job of this site. We do not collect our own data — we consume the open datasets and cite them.
Neutrality here is a process, not a vibe. Opinions and characterisations are always attributed to whoever holds them, never asserted by us. Where reliable sources disagree, the competing accounts are set out side by side and no winner is picked. Explanations of why something happened are treated as arguments, not facts, and each one is tied to the person or study that made it.
the labels
Every claim says how certain it is
Every factual claim on this site carries one of five labels, written in the knowledge base alongside the claim itself:
established
multiple independent reliable sources agree, and nobody credible disputes it.
contested
reliable sources disagree, or official and independent accounts differ. We show the competing accounts and do not pick one.
alleged
claimed or charged, but not concluded by a court.
adjudicated
a court has ruled. Appeals and pardons are stated as separate facts.
uncertain
genuinely unknown at the time of writing.
Being clear about what is uncertain is a feature of this site, not a caveat. Sensitive topics — May 13, royalty, race and religion — additionally stick strictly to established-plus-contested framing, cite academic and official sources, and carry a "handled with care" badge.
the sourcing rule
We never store just a conclusion. Every claim in the fact layer keeps its sources — outlet, author, URL, date — and the site can always answer "how do we know this?" for any sentence on it. Election results come from SPR via ElectionData.MY (CC0) and a hand-verified historical table; from 2008 onward they are checked seat-for-seat against official results. For what happened, we prefer reporting written at the time; for what it meant, we prefer later academic work.
where the work stands
This is a working project and it says so on every page. Research is AI-assisted: separate models research and verify each other's citations, and pages that pass verification are published with a "researched · awaiting editorial review" badge until a human editor signs them off. Pages on sensitive topics require that human review before anything changes status. If something on this site looks wrong, it may well be — the open questions each page lists are exactly the parts we know are not settled yet.