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Reviewing Misunderstandings

When someone says something in a meeting — or in chat, whether that is a captured Slack or Teams thread or an exported Slack channel's history — that conflicts with what your sources say, Mention flags it as a misunderstanding: one side is a claim a named member made on a call or in chat, the other is what your documents record. It is an ordinary contradiction with a person attached to one side — the same detection, the same resolution, routed to someone who can settle it.

That routing is the point, and it is what separates a misunderstanding from an ordinary contradiction. A conflict involving a member is a question for the owner of that member's Audience, because they know whether the member got it wrong or the document went stale. A conflict between two sources — no member involved — has nobody to ask about, so it stays with the org admins on the Contradictions page rather than reaching an Audience at all.

While one waits for you

A pending misunderstanding does not leave both statements in play. Mention prefers the document and hides the member's claim from the AI's context until you decide — whatever the timestamps say, and even though the member almost always spoke more recently. A misunderstanding is by definition the case where the documented position is right and the person is wrong; if it turns out the other way round, that is your Our docs are stale ruling, not something Mention should assume while it waits.

Where to find it

Open the Audience you own and go to its Questions tab. Misunderstandings appear in their own section under the unanswered questions, grouped by the member who made the claim.

You get there from the notification too: when a conflict is routed to your Audience, Mention notifies its owners. Notifications are batched into a daily digest, so a busy week is one notification rather than twenty.

Org admins keep the full picture. Every contradiction — routed or not — remains visible under Sources → Contradictions: the page opens on the conflicts no Audience owns, and its All conflicts filter shows the routed ones too.

Who can review one

  • The owners of the Audience it was routed to — including the power to invalidate an org-wide document fact by ruling that the member was right. This is the same trust already extended when an owner answers an unanswered question, which mints an org-wide fact.
  • Org admins — everywhere, as before.

Members who are not owners, and owners of other Audiences, cannot see or decide an Audience's conflicts.

A misunderstanding is routed to one Audience, chosen once when it is detected — never several, so two owners can never race to opposite conclusions. It is normally one the speaker belongs to; when the speaker belongs to none, the claims are matched by subject against each Audience's name and description instead. When Mention cannot tell which Audience the disagreement is about, it is not routed at all and stays in the org-admin queue.

Resolving one

Each card shows the two statements side by side — what the member said, and what your sources say — with when each was stated. Three outcomes:

  • Confirm our docs — your documentation is right. The member's claim is retired from the knowledge base.
  • Our docs are stale — the member is right and the document is out of date. The document's fact is invalidated org-wide, so it stops appearing in every future article and answer. Use this when the written source has fallen behind reality.
  • Not a conflict — the two statements do not actually disagree. Both stay in use.

Unlike the org-admin contradictions queue, decisions here apply immediately — there is nothing to stage and submit.

Confirm our docs is the only outcome the member hears about. They get a notification carrying the winning statement — the correct answer, not a note that they were wrong — so they stop working from the old one. See When Your Handbook Says Otherwise for what they see. Ruling the docs stale and marking it not a conflict tell the member nothing.