Steering¶
Steering is how admins teach Mention. You ask Mention a question, read its answer, and accept, reject, or correct the answer. As you work through questions, the same view also surfaces contradictions — pairs of facts from your sources that conflict — for you to resolve. Both signals improve the accuracy of generated Articles, SOPs, and Q&A answers across every Audience.
Where to find it¶
Steering is available on both web and mobile.
- Web — Open Knowledge from the admin sidebar. The header shows what Mention is drawing on ("Drawing on N assets · M corrections"). The correction count includes pending and corrected records only — accepted and rejected answers are cleared from the conversation once you decide them.
- Mobile — As an admin you get a bottom tab bar with Learn, Steering, and Conflicts. Open the Steering tab to ask questions; contradictions live on the Conflicts tab, which shows a badge with the number of pending items.
The two surfaces are the same workflow on the same backend queue. A correction submitted on mobile shows up immediately in the web view, and vice versa.
What admins do here¶
There are three things you do in Steering, in roughly this order:
- Ask a question — Type a question in the composer at the bottom of the view. Mention generates a grounded answer using your activated source material. Each question and answer becomes a correction record, which starts in the pending state.
- Accept, reject, correct, or delete the answer — Read the answer and decide:
- Accept if the answer is good. Mention records it as accepted and uses it as a positive signal for future generations. The question and answer then leave the conversation view.
- Reject if the supporting facts are simply wrong and you do not want to provide replacement wording. Mention records it as rejected, suppresses the facts that supported the answer, and then clears the question and answer from the conversation view.
- Correct if the answer is wrong. Explain what is wrong and what the correct answer should be. Mention records your feedback as a corrected outcome and uses it to steer future answers about the same subject. Corrected records stay in the conversation so you can review what you taught — on web they collapse to a single row showing the question, and you click the row to expand the original answer, your correction, and the improved answer.
- Delete a pending or corrected record if it was a one-off you don't want to keep. You cannot ask a new question while the most recent one is still pending — accept, reject, or correct it first.
- Resolve contradictions — The Mention's questions sidebar (web) — or the Conflicts tab (mobile) — surfaces things Mention needs your help with, grouped into Conflicts and Unanswered. The Conflicts group lists any contradictions Mention has detected in your sources. For each one, you can:
- Resolve by picking the fact you believe is correct. The other fact is suppressed in future context.
- Discard if the contradiction is a false positive. Both facts remain in use. Decisions can be submitted individually or in bulk. Auto-resolve (in the web sidebar and the mobile screen) is a short-hand that stages a resolution for every conflict it can rank, so you can review the picks and submit them at once. Pick the rule that matches how you trust your sources:
- Newest source wins — keep the fact whose source was updated most recently (newer information tends to be more accurate).
- Prefer docs — keep the fact backed by written documentation.
- Prefer chat — keep the fact from conversations, transcripts, and calls. Under every rule, a conflict backed by a Mention-authored source (a correction, report, or feature brief) keeps that side, and any conflict the rule can't confidently rank is left untouched for you to decide.
- Answer unanswered questions — The Unanswered group lists questions people asked that Mention couldn't answer, ranked by how often they were asked. Answer one to fill the gap, or dismiss it. See Answering Unanswered Questions.
Why corrections matter¶
Corrections feed directly into how Mention generates content for your members. When an admin marks an answer as wrong and explains the correct version, Mention treats that explanation as a strong, organization-specific signal: future Articles, SOPs, and member Q&A answers about the same subject reflect the corrected version.
This is the most direct lever you have for improving answer quality short of editing source material itself.
Why contradictions matter¶
A contradiction is a pair of facts about the same Concept that Mention's analysis judged to be in conflict — for example, two source documents that describe the same process differently. Until you resolve a contradiction, both facts remain in play and members may see content that reflects either version. Resolving a contradiction excludes the losing fact from future context, producing more consistent generated content.
For a deeper look at how contradictions are detected and what severity scores mean, see Reviewing Contradictions.
Steering and credits¶
Asking a question, generating answers, and contradiction detection all consume credits. See Understanding Credits for the full list.
Steering vs. an Audience's persona¶
Steering is org-wide and it's about teaching: questions you ask here are answered from all of your organization's activated source material, and the corrections you submit improve generated content across every Audience.
That's different from an Audience's persona. The persona is about shaping — Mention infers a profile of a typical audience member and rebuilds that audience's Glossary and Playbook from it (plus the sources you've activated). See Building with Personas.
Related pages¶
- Reviewing Contradictions — detection mechanics and resolution impact
- Audiences
- Understanding Credits