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Curating Contents

This page walks you through writing an audience's table of contents — the things its members need to know — and keeping it healthy.

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.

Open the contents

  1. Sign in as an owner of the audience (or an org admin) and open Audiences from the sidebar.
  2. Pick the audience you're curating for from the audiences list (the column on the left, or the full-screen list on mobile).
  3. Open the Curriculum tab.

The Curriculum tab is the whole authoring surface: the entries grouped by what each one is for, each with a single status, and the controls to add and open them. Opening an entry shows its Brief, Article, and Lesson one at a time — edit the brief, read the article, and on the lesson tab walk through the exercises the way a learner meets them. Curriculum is visible to audience owners and org admins only — learners see the Hub tab.

Your starting entries

When you create an audience, Mention writes a starting table of contents for it. 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 subject can produce more than one entry. A subject usually leaves a reader with more than one kind of question, so Mention proposes an entry for each kind your material genuinely supports: the thresholds as a reference, the procedure as a how-to, the reasoning behind them as an explanation. Two entries with related names are not 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 writes an entry when your sources genuinely cover the subject, so an empty contents list means there is not enough material yet. Connect more sources, or write the first entries yourself.

This happens once, when the audience is created. Connecting sources later does not add new entries to an audience that already has them.

Add an entry

Click Add article on the Curriculum tab. The Add an article dialog asks for exactly two things:

  • Title — what members see in the contents list, between 3 and 200 characters. Write it as the thing they need to know: "How refunds are approved," not "Refunds v2 (draft)."
  • 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.

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 for one kind of thing. Mention writes every article as exactly one of four shapes — a reference, a how-to, an explanation, or a tutorial — and it settles which from your brief. 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 a one-line reason explaining what it was missing, and members see the same notice instead of an article.

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.

How the contents are organized

The Curriculum tab groups entries by what each article is for, not by any sequence you maintain:

  • Learn by doing — first time through, learning the shape of the work
  • Get something done — a task they already know they need to carry out
  • Look something up — the details nobody is expected to hold in their head
  • Understand why — the reasoning behind how this works the way it does

Mention settles which group an entry belongs to as it writes the article, from the brief you wrote. Entries whose articles have not been written yet sit under Being written until that happens. A group with nothing in it is not shown, which makes the gaps easy to read: an audience with eleven look-ups and no how-tos is telling you something about what its members can actually do.

Within each group, entries are listed alphabetically. There is no ordering to maintain — nothing gates one entry on another, and members work through them in whatever order suits them. Learners see the same grouping, under the same four names, on their contents screen on web and on mobile.

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 resolve a contradiction upstream, or when the daily refresh finds its source material has shifted. Its lesson is composed again from the rewritten document.

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.