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¶
- Sign in as an admin and open Audiences from the sidebar.
- Pick the audience you're curating for (there's an audience switcher in the audience header).
- 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. Note that it still has to appear enough times in your activated sources for Mention to define and teach it; if it barely shows up, Mention can't build 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.
- It works out the prerequisite links between concepts (so they form a valid, non-circular learning order).
Once a build completes, each concept card displays its position number, name, generated definition (with mentions of other concepts highlighted), and its prerequisite dependencies. 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 on demand the first time a member opens it, and then served from cache on later visits. 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.
Members can also regenerate the concept they're viewing from the article itself. Use this sparingly: each generation consumes credits — see Understanding Credits.
Related guides¶
- Building with Conversations — how the glossary's first draft is created.
- Curating playbooks — choose which processes become SOPs for the same audience.
- Managing assets — control which source material feeds candidates and mentions.
- Glossaries and concepts — how glossaries fit the Mention model.
- Learning concepts — what members see when they learn glossary-backed topics.