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Core Concepts Overview

Mention is built around a small set of concepts that describe how your organization's existing documents become knowledge your team actually holds. Understanding them helps you get the most out of the platform whether you are an admin setting things up or a member learning.

The knowledge model

At a high level, Mention works like this:

Sources contain Assets. Assets are analyzed into the facts that make up your organization's knowledge base. An Audience — a readership that needs a particular body of knowledge — has Contents written by its owner: a list of entries, each one a name and a prompt. Mention writes each entry into an Article: a single markdown document, grounded in your knowledge base. From each Article it then composes a Lesson: a short sequence of exercises the member works through by attempting things. Members finish an entry by finishing its Lesson, and the Article opens up in full once they have.

Key terms at a glance

Term What it is
Source A connection to an external content platform (e.g., your Notion workspace)
Asset A specific document selected from a Source for Mention to analyze
Audience A readership: a group of members who share one set of Contents
Contents What this readership is told — the list of entries an Audience's owner writes. They live on the Lessons page, which both roles share
Entry One line of an Audience's Contents: a name members see, and a prompt saying what the article should cover
Article The markdown document Mention writes from an entry's prompt, shared by the whole Audience. What you consult
Lesson The 5 to 9 exercises Mention composes from an Article. What makes you know it — one Article, one Lesson
Exercise One step of a Lesson: a setup, the learner's attempt, then the correction. Nothing is revealed before they commit
Glossary term A word your organization uses, with a definition written from your sources. Organization-wide, not per-Audience
Topic A glossary term your organization organizes knowledge around. It joins the glossary early and groups the lessons and questions about it
Question Something somebody asked, in their own words — or one Mention seeded and answered for a new Audience. Open until an answer is on record, then answered
Answer What your organization says in reply to a question — the volatile half of your knowledge. It cites its facts, and goes stale when they change
Contradiction A pair of facts that conflict with each other, flagged for review
Misunderstanding A contradiction where one side is something a named member said on a call or in chat, routed to the owners of that member's Audience

How the pieces connect

  1. An admin connects a Source (like Google Drive) and selects which documents to activate as Assets.
  2. Mention analyzes the Assets and extracts the facts they contain into your organization's knowledge base.
  3. An admin creates an Audience (like "Engineering Team") and assigns an owner to it.
  4. The owner writes the Audience's Contents — for each thing the Audience needs to know, an entry with a name and a prompt like "write me an overview of how refunds are approved."
  5. Mention writes each entry into an Article from the knowledge base. Writing is asynchronous and takes a short while; the Lessons page shows each entry's status as it goes.
  6. As soon as an Article is written, Mention composes its Lesson from that document — automatically, with nothing extra for the owner to commission.
  7. Members open the Audience and work through its Lessons, attempting each exercise and reading the correction they earn. Finishing a Lesson unlocks its Article to read whenever they want.
  8. Material a member has passed comes back for review on a fixed schedule, so what they know stays current rather than being something they once knew.

Glossary

Alongside articles, Mention keeps a glossary: the terms your organization uses and what each one means here. Mention nominates terms as it reads your sources, and a term is promoted into the glossary once your sources have mentioned it at least five times — two for a Topic, which is promoted ahead of everything else — with its definition written from those mentions.

Terms are organization-wide by design — one word should mean one thing across every Audience, not something different in each. They are not something articles are written about; they are the vocabulary articles are written in. The first mention of a term becomes a link you can hover for the definition — in an article, in a lesson, and inside another definition. A definition reaches you where the word is used, and nobody has to maintain the list. See The Glossary.

Topics and questions

One label does more than the others. A term labelled Topic names something your organization organizes its knowledge around, and it is what everything else hangs off: the lessons written about it, and the questions people ask about it.

Questions are free-form — whatever somebody actually asked, recorded once for the whole organization with per-audience ask counts on top. Mention answers what your sources support. A question it cannot answer stays open; one it can becomes answered and files under its topic, where anyone in the Audience can read it. Mention also seeds questions when an Audience is created, keeping the ones your sources can answer so the obvious things are settled before anybody asks — and discarding the rest, so nothing seeded ever stands as an open question.

Open questions live on their Audience's Gaps tab and nowhere else — they are work, not reading material. Everything settled is kept as ready inventory, served instantly when asked again, and the most-asked of it surfaces in the FAQ beside the Chat conversation, with its ask counts. Lessons are grouped by topic on the Lessons page, with anything filed under no topic grouped under General last. See Topics and Questions.

Mention also monitors extracted knowledge for contradictions — cases where facts conflict. Each one is routed to the Audience whose owners are best placed to settle it, and appears in Conflicts: when one side is something a named member said on a call the conflict is a misunderstanding and goes to that member's Audience, and a conflict between sources goes to the Audience whose described area covers the subject. Conflicts that fall outside any Audience are reviewed by admins. Either way the resolution improves the accuracy of the articles Mention writes and the answers it gives. See Reviewing Contradictions and Reviewing Misunderstandings.

When an article isn't ready

Mention writes articles from your connected sources and nothing else. If those sources do not cover what an entry's prompt asks for, the article comes back not ready, with a one-line reason, instead of inventing an answer.

This is a normal state, not an error. It is a prompt to connect more source material, or to narrow the entry so it asks for something your documents actually cover. Members see the same notice and the reason, so nobody reads a plausible-sounding article that nothing backs up. See Curating Contents.

What progress means

A member has finished an entry when they have passed every piece of material its Lesson grades. That is a measurement, not an acknowledgement: they attempted things and were graded against the Article.

Two words describe where a member stands in an Audience, and they mean different things:

  • Complete — they have finished every Lesson in the Audience.
  • Current — they have finished every Lesson and nothing in it is overdue for review.

Current is the number worth watching. See Monitoring Progress.

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