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Curating Contents

Contents is what one readership is told: for each topic that matters to them, the lessons Mention has written at length. You curate it from the Lessons page in the sidebar, and this page walks you through it.

Each entry produces two artifacts: an article, the document Mention writes from your prompt, and a lesson, the exercises Mention composes from that article. You author the entry; both follow from it. For the lessons themselves, see Curating Lessons.

An article is a narrow thing: it answers one question, for this readership. That is worth holding onto, because it explains why the page is shaped the way it is and why a prompt asking three things at once produces a worse article than three prompts. See Articles and Lessons.

Open the contents

  1. Sign in as an owner of the audience (or an org admin).
  2. Pick the audience you're curating for in the audience switcher at the top of the sidebar (or from the full-screen list on mobile).
  3. Open Lessons in the sidebar.

The Lessons page is the authoring surface: every entry written for this readership, grouped by topic, each with a single status. Filter the list by picking topics, and use the Ask for a lesson row to commission a new entry. Opening a lesson shows its Article, Lesson, and Progress one at a time — read the article (with Edit in its header for the title and the brief it is written from), walk through the exercises the way a learner meets them, and see which learners have finished the lesson, which are partway, and which have not started. Learners meet the same entries on their own Lessons page with their progress, without the authoring controls.

How the contents are organized

Entries are grouped by the topic each article explains, not by any sequence you maintain, most-asked topics first.

A topic holds however many entries it has been given. There is no fixed set of documents a topic must have, no grid of slots, and no target to hit — six lessons on one topic and one on another is a perfectly good shape for an audience. Mention settles which topic an entry belongs to as it writes the article, from the brief you wrote.

Entries not tied to any topic sit under General, the last group on the page. They work exactly like the rest: you can open, edit, and remove them. There is no ordering to maintain — nothing gates one entry on another, and members work through them in whatever order suits them. An entry you add by hand may start under General and move under its topic once Mention has written the article and settled which topic it explains.

Nothing on this page shows a hole. There are no placeholder rows for questions nobody has commissioned — what is genuinely missing is a question on the Audience's Gaps tab, where it can be answered, not an empty slot in a grid.

About duplicates

Mention will not propose a second entry under a title this audience already has, which is what stops obvious duplication when it proposes further articles later.

Beyond that, whether two entries cover similar ground is your judgement. If you commission the same ground twice by hand under two different titles, nothing stops you, and the duplicate is yours to remove. The same goes for turning a question into a lesson: the call is yours.

Your starting entries

When you create an audience, Mention fills its contents for you. It reads the concepts your connected material actually covers, works out which of them this audience needs, and adds entries for each — titles and prompts already filled in. Those entries begin writing straight away, exactly as if you had typed them.

One topic often produces several entries. A topic leaves a reader with more than one question, so Mention proposes an entry for each subject your sources actually support — the thresholds, the procedure, the reasoning behind them. Two entries with related names are not necessarily a duplicate; they answer different questions, and each is written in the shape that answers it.

You are not committed to any of them. Edit a prompt to change what an entry covers, or remove the ones that do not fit — see the sections below. Removing an entry deletes its article and lesson.

If nothing appears, that is a real answer. Mention only brings a topic into an audience when your sources genuinely cover it at all, so an empty contents list means there is not enough material yet. Connect more sources, or write the first entries yourself.

Which topics an audience gets is settled once, when the audience is created: connecting sources later does not pull a new topic into contents that already exist. What you add afterwards is yours to commission — write the entry, or promote an answered question into one.

Add an entry

Click the Ask for a lesson row at the top of the Lessons page. The Add an article dialog asks for exactly two things:

  • Title — what this entry is called, between 3 and 200 characters. Write it as the thing they need to know: "How refunds are approved," not "Refunds v2 (draft)." This is the title members see.
  • What it should cover — the prompt Mention writes from, in your own words, at least 10 characters. Write it as an instruction to a colleague.

Ask for another article on topic at the bottom of a topic's panel opens the same dialog. Mention settles which topic the finished article belongs to from the article itself, not from the panel you started in, so a prompt you rewrite into something else lands where it actually belongs.

Confirm with Add article and Mention starts writing. Writing is asynchronous: the entry appears in the list right away with a status, and the document lands a short while later. You do not write the document yourself — there is no editor for the article body. Once the article is written, Mention composes its lesson from it automatically.

An audience can hold at most 100 articles.

Writing a good prompt

The prompt is the whole lever you have over what the article says, so it is worth a sentence or two more than feels necessary.

  • Name the scope. "Write an overview of how refunds are approved" gets a better article than "refunds." Say what the reader should be able to do or explain afterwards.
  • Ask one question. A prompt that asks how to do something gets steps; one that asks why something is the way it is gets the reasoning; one that asks what the thresholds are gets a description you can scan. A prompt that asks for all three at once gets whichever it leads with, and the rest belongs in its own entry. See Articles and Lessons.
  • Say who is reading. "…for a new support agent in their first week" tells Mention how much to assume.
  • Bound it. One entry, one topic. If a prompt covers three unrelated things, split it into three entries — a narrower prompt is much less likely to come back not ready.
  • Ask for what your sources actually have. Mention writes from your activated assets and nothing else. A prompt that asks for something nobody has written down cannot be answered, however well phrased.
  • Don't write the article in the prompt. You are commissioning it, not drafting it. Describe the coverage you want and let Mention pull the facts.

Changing an entry's prompt makes Mention write the document again from scratch, and compose its lesson again from the new document. Saving an entry whose title and prompt you did not actually change is a no-op: nothing is rewritten and no lesson is composed again, so opening an entry to look at it costs you nothing.

One prompt habit is worth adding now that lessons exist: say what the reader should be able to do, not just what the article should mention. An article written to state rules gives the composer thresholds, decisions, and boundary cases to exercise. An article written as a glossary of terms gives it very little, and may not support a lesson at all.

Entry status

Each entry carries one status chip — not one for the article and one for the lesson. The entry, the article written from it, and the lesson composed from that article are one thing to an owner, so the chip reports whichever stage is currently holding the entry back:

Status What it means
Not written The article has not been started yet.
Queued Mention has picked the entry up and is gathering context.
Writing The document is being written.
Needs more sources Mention could not write this from your connected sources. See below.
Write failed Something went wrong producing the document.
Article ready The article is written; its lesson has not started composing yet.
Lesson queued The article is written and its lesson is waiting to be composed.
Composing lesson The article is written and its lesson is being composed.
Lesson failed The article is written and readable, but composing its lesson went wrong.
Article only The article is written and readable, but it does not support a lesson — there was nothing in it to exercise.
Ready The article is written and its lesson is composed. This is the finished state.

An entry is Ready only when both halves exist. A lesson problem never touches the article: Lesson failed and Article only entries stay readable for members. See Curating Lessons.

When an article isn't ready

Needs more sources is a normal state, not an error. It means Mention looked at your activated assets, could not cover what the prompt asked for, and said so rather than inventing content. The entry shows the status chip and a control to add source material; members see the same chip instead of an article.

Expect to see it, especially early on. Mention keeps retrying as material lands, so an entry sitting here is one Mention is still working on.

Treat it as a prompt to do one of two things:

  • Connect more source material. The knowledge genuinely isn't in Mention yet. Activate the documents that cover it, add them as an upload, or capture the Slack thread where it was discussed. See Managing Assets.
  • Narrow the entry. Sometimes the prompt is asking for more than your organization has ever written down. Split it, or scope it to the part your documents do cover.

Answering the question directly also works: if the gap has been raised as an unanswered question, answering it adds that knowledge to the knowledge base, and the article can then be written.

Once you have connected the missing material or narrowed the prompt, Mention writes the entry again on its own — see Rewriting an entry.

When it isn't a curation decision

Some of what looks like a contents problem is really a judgement only a person can make: a question nobody has answered, or two sources that contradict each other.

Each has its own place. Open questions are worked on the Audience's Gaps tab and contradictions in Conflicts. Settling one feeds the articles that rest on it — the entries are rewritten across every audience that carries them, without you touching a prompt.

Rewriting an entry

Mention writes an article again on its own when the material behind it moves: when you change the entry's prompt, when you connect the missing source, or when a fact the article was written from stops standing — a document edited away, a source deleted, a contradiction raised, discarded or resolved. Those rewrites are event-driven: the article is queued within about a minute of the change, without waiting for a nightly pass. A daily reconciliation still runs behind them and picks up anything the events missed. Its lesson is composed again from the rewritten document.

One case deliberately waits: material that is simply new and contradicts nothing you already hold does not trigger a rewrite. Nothing an article rests on has changed, so the new material reaches the page at the next reconciliation, or sooner if it turns out to conflict with something an article cites.

A rewrite does not reset your learners. Their progress is recorded against the material an exercise covers rather than against the exercise, so a rebuilt lesson keeps mastery of everything that didn't change and starts cold only on material that is genuinely new.

Each write consumes credits, and so does each lesson composed from it — see Understanding Credits.

Removing an entry

Removing an entry deletes it from the contents and deletes its article and lesson. Members lose access to it immediately, and it stops counting toward adoption.