During my IDS check-in with my mentor, I she asked if I provided any sources on my learning journey. I do add links to my posts for further reading, but for tutorials, I don’t cite any sources. The reason I don’t do so is because I don’t need to; it just works. If you follow the tutorial and have faith in what I am saying, it will all work out. I think this is similar to news articles in one way; something does happen. What happened could be a wide variety of things; A president got elected, “ping” sends a ping packet to a server, Canada’s population grew by 2 million, etc… These things are facts. The way they are doesn’t change, only the way they are represented. So, the best representation of the facts must be as raw as possible.
How can I apply this to my writing?
My writing is just a basic re-hash of facts, or documentation in my case. It is written to be beginner-friendly and easily accessible to someone, unlike the documentation. But, there are hidden biases, even in factual writing. Because I assume my audience is inexperienced, I leave out technical details that could be useful to someone with more skills. So, you can’t make a perfectly written article. There may be a perfect balance between the two sides (too detailed and too basic) but it would be too hard, and frankly not worth it. I would rather find a website that is too basic for the average person but good for me (because I am a beginner) than have a jack-of-all-trades article that kind of caters to everyone. Because my audience is a basic, beginner audience, I will write and be biased for them.