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Curating Glossaries

This page walks you through building and maintaining a glossary for an audience so only the concepts you choose become personalized learning for members.

Open the glossary

  1. Sign in as an 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 Glossary tab.

The Glossary tab is a single list of concept cards, with a search bar at the top for adding new concepts. Each card shows a concept's name, label, mention count, generated definition, and prerequisite links.

Choose which concepts are in the glossary

Use the search bar to add a concept from three sources:

  • Existing concepts — terms already known in your organization (from other audiences or earlier curation).
  • Concept candidates — terms Mention surfaced from your activated content. A term becomes a candidate once it's mentioned at least 5 times across your active assets.
  • Write-ins — type in a term that didn't surface as a candidate. It must appear at least 5 times across your activated sources for Mention to define and teach it.

Added concepts appear as pending cards below the existing ones until you save. To remove concepts, click Select, tick the cards you want to drop, then click Remove — they switch to a pending-remove state (you can undo any of them with the ⟲ button). Hit Save Changes to commit both your adds and removes in one go, or Cancel to throw them away.

Only the concepts you include are turned into learning material (articles and the learning sequence for that audience). Removing a concept takes it out of members' paths.

A glossary can hold at most 20 concepts. Trying to save more raises an error — pick the concepts that matter most and drop the rest.

How Mention builds the glossary

You choose which concepts are in the glossary. Mention does the rest during the glossary build:

  • It writes each concept's definition.
  • It arranges the concepts into a learning order, with prerequisites first.
  • It works out the prerequisite links between concepts. Where a few concepts are defined in terms of one another, Mention groups them into a cluster that members learn together (see Concept clusters) rather than forcing an artificial order between them.

Once a build completes, each concept card displays its position number, name, generated definition (with mentions of other concepts highlighted), and its prerequisite dependencies. Concepts that belong to a cluster show a Cluster badge and a "Learned together with" list naming their fellow members. While a build is in progress, the cards stay in place and show a "Defining…" indicator until the new definitions land.

Build status

Whenever you change the concept set, or new source assets are activated, Mention rebuilds the glossary. A build status banner ("Generating definitions and analyzing dependencies") appears while that work is in progress. Wait for it to finish before assuming the definitions, order, and dependencies are final.

Regenerating articles

Each concept's article is generated for every member of the Audience — when a member joins, and when you add a new concept to an Audience that already has members — then served from cache on later visits. If a member opens a concept before its article has finished, they see a brief loading state. Mention regenerates an article when the underlying material changes meaningfully — for example, when a concept's definition changes during a glossary rebuild, or when new source assets affect what the concept references. A daily job sweeps the catalog and refreshes articles whose source material has shifted, so members opening the concept after a regeneration see the new version on their next visit. Removing a concept deletes its article for every member.

Members can also regenerate the concept they're viewing from the article itself. Use this sparingly: each generation consumes credits — see Understanding Credits.