The Glossary¶
Terms are the words your team uses and what each one means here. They are organization-wide, not per-Audience — one term, one meaning, wherever it appears.
The glossary is not something you build or maintain. Mention assembles it while it reads your sources, writes each definition from what those sources actually say, and keeps it current as your documentation grows. There is no glossary to visit and nothing to approve.
How a term joins¶
Mention notices terminology while it analyzes your sources: as it extracts each fact, it judges which organization-specific terms the fact mentions — named products, features, tools, workflows, personas, metrics, standards — and nominates them as candidates. A candidate becomes a term once your sources have mentioned it at least five times, promoted in ranked batches: each pass considers the most-mentioned candidates first and promotes a handful at a time, so heavily used terms join ahead of marginal ones. Terms cross the line on their own as more source material arrives.
The threshold is deliberate. A definition written from one passing mention would be a guess, and guessed definitions are worse than a gap.
Every term carries one of eleven labels saying what kind of thing it is — Product Feature, Domain Object, Internal Tool, Third-Party Tool, Workflow, Persona, Competitor, Jargon, Business Metric, Technical Term, or Compliance Standard — shown alongside the definition wherever it opens.
How definitions are written¶
A definition is a sentence, occasionally two — enough to remind you what the word means without taking you out of the paragraph you were reading. It is not a summary of everything known about the term; the usage detail, thresholds, and examples belong in the articles that use the word.
A definition is written from the facts that mention the term, and from nothing else. Mention does not fall back on the term's general-industry meaning to fill a gap, so a thin definition means thin source material rather than a bad writer. The fix for a definition that reads poorly is more source material about the term, not an edit.
Definitions are rewritten when a term's mention count doubles — at five mentions, then ten, then twenty, and so on. That keeps an established term current as your documentation grows, without rewriting everything every time a source is ingested.
Where definitions show up¶
- In article prose. The first mention of a term in an article becomes a link. Hover it — or tap it — and the definition opens in place. Nothing navigates away, and the article stays exactly where it was.
- In lessons. The scenario and question of an exercise, the passage behind Look it up, and the correction you get after answering all link their terms the same way. A lesson is open book, so looking a word up costs nothing. Review is the exception: the question itself is not linked there, because review checks what stuck without the material in front of you. Its corrections still are.
- Inside other definitions. When one term's definition uses another term, that word is a link too. Following it replaces what the panel is showing, with a back arrow to return, so you can walk a chain of related words without leaving the paragraph you were reading. The panel also lists up to six other terms whose definitions mention the one you are looking at.
- In the answers Mention gives. Terms connect facts that are worded differently but mean the same thing, which is what lets an answer drawn from your documents pick up what was said in a meeting transcript or a Slack thread about the same subject.
If you want a definition without an article in front of you, ask for it: the Ask tab on an Audience answers "what does X mean here?" from your own sources. See Asking Questions.