Talk:Sabah

1. REDIRECT Template:Press

Concerns on indigenous Sabahan representation

Recently I've begun to notice that a lot of edits create forced, irrelevant associations with the cultures and languages indigenous to the Luzon, presumably as an attempt to frame Sabah within a Filipino-adjacent perspective. As a native Kadazandusun I don't respect this.

Other attempts presumably with editors with roots from the Southern Philippines try to do the same flavor of unsolicited irredentism by adding bits of trivia that try to make Sabah sound more Tausug, Islamic, or Malay than it actually is and ever was.

Whereas the indigenous cultures, languages, and peoples notably the Kadazandusun, Murut, Rungus, Sama, are merely mentioned in passing references like tokens to bulk the article word count. AnderGapoh (talk) 11:11, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi AnderGapoh, do you have specific examples? If information is "irrelevant" ("undue" may be a better word), it can be removed or shifted to a more detailed page. CMD (talk) 13:43, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis I occasionally check this article and remove any irrelevant statements that try to nudge the narrative in favor of the current irredentist claims. The latest edit where I removed a few questionable sources (including one that described itself as an 'alternative' news source) is one example of what I'm concerned about.

I personally have no gripes with mentioning the pan-Austronesian ties that the region shares across borders (not just Sabah with the Philippines), but citing coincidentally similar-sounding words in a language native to what happens to be the political center of a country making irredentist claims is obviously an attempt to establish an unreasonable narrative.

Sabah is also a state that historically (and really still is) affected by politically-motivated demographic engineering.

Examples: https://www.thevibes.com/articles/news/107459/villagers-in-sabah-find-themselves-listed-as-muslims-without-their-knowledge

https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/4d9f9189-6d29-4e6c-94bf-b519432c0db1

Some of these Islamization efforts naturally spill over into online spaces where Sabah is represented to the world (i.e. Wikipedia). For example, commonly misattributing the name of the state to the Arabic word for 'morning' (which is meritless since ه and ح are completely different letters anyway). AnderGapoh (talk) 13:59, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

P.S. Thanks for taking my concern seriously. It's really common for concerns such as this to be ignored online. AnderGapoh (talk) 14:00, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

Another concern of mine is the gross aggrandization of the territorial extent of the so-called Bruneian and Sulu 'Empires'.

Contemporary historiography often frames these village-states as akin to the Roman Empire with territories completely encompassing modern borders. Brunei's influence was limited to the coast in Putatan, for example, yet you'd find tons of maps online that color the entire north of Borneo yellow, to imply a fictional 'historical' Bruneian subjugation of the territory and the indigenous population within it.

Some of these images have spilled over into various Wikipedias. AnderGapoh (talk) 14:05, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

If there are specific issues we can deal with them. We aim to present the demographic changes, cultural links, and similar without doing so in a way that unduly favours a particular narrative. CMD (talk) 15:20, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi AnderGapoh, Wikipedia, as much as it strives to be neutral, are after all still a majorly open platform to editors from all background. The neutrality of course depends on how many editors subscribes to such mentality, because we typically do not realize our own biases. Even administrators, may have their own biases, but of course since they are elected through voting system and tend to be scrutinized for their credibility, can be the judge but there are only a handful of them.

As such, I believe it is the responsibility of each of us to edit articles/paragraph that we find skewed. Only then it will attract the attention of other editors to judge your edit, hence with many people seeing the edit change, not only it helps more peer review, but also sometimes makes us realize our own biases before judging others.

Hence, feel free to edit those you find problematic, and surely with notification, people will note the changes and support you if it is indeed correcting the biases. Let's strive for a neutral public Encyclopedia.

P/s: you might feel that this just became worse recently, trust me the battle that some of us had to undertake to withstand vandalism and war edit during the 2013 sulu invasion and 2021 arbitration was so much more intense. Danazach (talk) 01:11, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Remove undocumented template parameters

There are some template parameters which aren't documented in the template doc and are preview errors in VisualEditor (eg. p#, demographics#_type#). They should either be replaced by other suitable parameters, replacing the template with {{Infobox political division}}, or removed from the article. Toffee Dude (talk) 12:41, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Article review

It has been a while since this article has been reviewed, so I took a look and noticed the following:

• There are some uncited statements within the article.
• There is a yellow "too large" banner at the top of the page from June 2023: I agree with this banner. I think there are some sections that could be summarised more effectively or spun out including "History", "Territorial disputes", "Economy", "Transportation", and "Portrayal in media", although all sections would benefit from a copyedit with a focus on reducing prose size.

Should this article go to WP:GAR? Z1720 (talk) 21:45, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't really agree with the "too long" statement. This is about perfect for the length of an article about a place with as rich a history as Sabah, and I think it might even be too short. Guylaen (talk) 09:31, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

The article is presently close to 16k words, which is a length at which it should be divided or trimmed. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:25, 24 March 2026 (UTC)