Editorial policy

This page is the standard SXM Wire holds itself to. It is written to be checkable: every rule below is one you can test against any page on the site, and one you can hold us to if a page fails it.

The publication's byline

The publication name is the byline: pages are attributed to SXM Wire as an Organization. There are no invented staff writers, no invented reviewers, and no invented credentials. The publication is accountable for the page, and the publication can be written to.

This is a deliberate trade. A named human byline reads as more authoritative, and manufacturing one would be trivial. It would also be a lie, and a lie precisely about the thing readers are trying to judge — whether anyone stands behind the work.

Qualifying a topic

Before a URL exists, somebody has to answer three questions in writing:

What is the reader trying to decide or do? Stated as a decision, not a phrase.
What do the existing pages get wrong or leave out? If the honest answer is "nothing", the page does not get written.
What will this page conclude? Not the exact wording, but the shape of the answer. A page written to find out what it thinks halfway through becomes a summary of its sources.

Search demand is evidence that a question is being asked. It is never, on its own, a reason to publish.

Sourcing

We work from primary sources first: vendor and manufacturer documentation, specifications, changelogs, standards, filings, and the actual software or hardware where it is publicly documented. Secondary reporting is used where it contributes analysis or reporting the primary source does not.

Rules that apply to every source:

Sources are read, not mined. Pulling one sentence out of a document to support a conclusion the rest of the document contradicts is worse than having no citation at all.
Dates are recorded. Sint Maarten local news and island intelligence moves. A specification true in March may be wrong by September, and a citation without a date cannot be checked for rot.
Primary beats popular. A vendor's own changelog outranks a widely-shared blog post about that changelog.
We do not scrape Google Search for rankings. What ranks is not evidence of what is true.

Evidencing claims

Any claim carrying a number, a price, a date, a version, or a capability must be traceable to a dated source a reader can open. Where a source is ambiguous, the page says so rather than picking the convenient reading.

Where the honest answer is uncertain, the page says it is uncertain and explains what the uncertainty depends on. "It depends" is a legitimate conclusion when the page also says what it depends on. It is not a legitimate way to avoid taking a position.

Experience claims

We do not claim hands-on experience we do not have. No invented benchmarks, no invented test rigs, no invented duration of use, no first-person anecdote written to make a compiled page feel lived-in.

Where a page does draw on direct work, it says exactly what was done and under what conditions, so the claim can be weighed rather than taken on trust.

Commercial independence

Advertising and affiliate arrangements are described in full on Advertising & affiliate disclosure. The editorial rules are simple and absolute:

Commercial relationships do not choose topics.
Advertisers and affiliate partners do not see drafts and do not review conclusions.
No product is added, removed, or reordered for commercial reasons.
Pages carrying affiliate links need more original analysis than pages that do not, not less. A page that would be worthless without its links should not exist.

Corrections

Errors get fixed in public. There are two tiers, and the difference is whether a reader could have acted on the error:

Substantive. A number, a step, a recommendation, a conclusion, or a product identification is wrong. The page is corrected and the visible updated date moves with it. Where the change reverses earlier advice, the page says so rather than quietly becoming a different page.
Cosmetic. Typos, broken links, formatting. Fixed quietly. The updated date does not move, because a date that moves for a comma stops carrying information.

We do not re-title a page "Updated" or "Revised" to look fresh, and we do not touch a page for the sole purpose of moving its date.

To report an error, send the URL, the sentence you believe is wrong, and — the single most useful thing — a link to a source. See Contact.

Dates on every page

Every page shows when it was published and, when the two differ, when it was last substantively revised. The same two dates go into the structured data search engines read — datePublished and dateModified — so what a results page shows and what the article shows cannot drift apart.

Photographs

Images follow their own standard: they must depict the actual subject, they carry credit in the caption, and no photograph is reused across two articles on this site. Image licensing covers ownership and reuse.

What gets rejected

Pages built around a keyword with no distinct reader need behind it.
Fabricated testing, fabricated quotes, fabricated scripts, fabricated benchmarks.
Unconfirmed release dates, prices, or specifications stated as fact.
Guest submissions written to place a link.
Padding: filler written to reach a length rather than to answer something.

Conflicts of interest

A conflict does not have to be financial to matter, and it does not have to be intentional to distort a page. Where anyone involved in a page holds a position, a relationship, or a stake that a reasonable reader would want to know about, the page says so at the point where it becomes relevant — not in a footer.

Standing rules:

Commercial relationships never determine coverage. That is covered in Advertising & affiliate disclosure and it is the load-bearing rule here.
Free products, access, or briefings received do not obligate coverage, favorable or otherwise, and are disclosed where a page relies on them.
Where a subject is also a commercial partner, the page says so.

Use of AI tooling

Language models are used in production here, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of thing this page exists to rule out.

What they are used for: drafting from a compiled, human-checked source pack; restructuring and tightening prose; checking a draft for internal contradictions and unsupported claims.

What they are not used for, and what the process is built to prevent:

They are not a source. A model's recollection of a specification is not evidence. Every factual claim traces to a document, not to a generation.
They do not invent experience. No first-person testing, no anecdote, no "in our testing" written by a model or by anyone else without the testing behind it.
They do not decide what to publish. Whether a topic has a distinct reader need behind it is a human judgment, and it happens before anything is drafted.
They do not ship unread. A page is read end to end by a person before it publishes, against the sources.

Machine assistance changes how quickly text is produced. It changes nothing about who is accountable for it, which is the publication, on every page.

Link policy

Outbound links do different jobs and are marked accordingly, so that both readers and search engines can tell them apart. The classification is described in full on Advertising & affiliate disclosure.

Two rules worth stating here. First, we link to sources even when they are competitors — a citation is an invitation to check the work, and withholding it to keep a reader on the page is a trick, not an editorial decision. Second, we do not sell links, do not exchange them, and do not accept payment to add, remove, or alter one. Requests to do so are declined without a reply.

Internal links point at pages that genuinely help with the same decision. A link farm dressed as "related reading" wastes the one thing a reader gave us.

Press material and embargoes

Press releases and briefings are read and are treated as what they are: a source with an obvious interest. Nothing from one is repeated as fact without independent confirmation, and no announcement produces a page on its own.

We do not agree to review conditions. Copy approval, pre-publication review by a subject, and guarantees of favorable treatment are declined in every case, and a briefing offered on those terms is declined with it.

Scores, rankings, and comparisons

Where a page ranks or compares products, the criteria are stated before the ranking, in the page, so the reader can disagree with the criteria rather than only with the outcome.

We do not publish a numeric score derived from nothing. A rating that cannot be explained by pointing at the criteria that produced it is decoration, and decorative precision is worse than none — it converts a judgment call into something that looks like a measurement.

Comparisons name the products that lost and why, including cases where the loss is narrow or depends on circumstance. A comparison that only says nice things about the winner has not compared anything.

Reader contributions

Corrections and sources sent by readers are welcome and are frequently the reason a page improves. They are checked before anything changes, because a confident correction can be wrong too.

Unsolicited guest articles are not published. Where the underlying suggestion is good, it becomes a topic to research and write here, not a placement.

Holding us to this

If a page on SXM Wire breaks a rule on this page, that is a correction like any other, and we would rather hear it from you than not. Use the contact form on this site when it is available, or reach the publisher through the domain WHOIS for sxmwire.com.