Skip to content

Topics and Questions

People ask your organization the same things over and over — in a standup, in a support ticket, on a sales call. Mention records those questions once, answers what your sources support, and is plain about the ones nobody has written down. Topics are how the answers get organized; questions are what actually drives the work.

Questions

A question is whatever somebody asked, in the words they asked it in. There is no fixed list, no template, and no set of questions Mention insists every topic must answer. Two things put a question on the list:

  • Somebody asked it. A member asks on Chat, or through the MCP server, and Mention records the question once for your whole organization. If Mention could answer it from your sources, it did — and the question is already answered. If it could not, the question stays open.
  • Mention seeded it. When an Audience is created, Mention writes the questions that audience will need answered, and keeps the ones your sources can answer. See Seeded questions.

Each question is recorded once, org-wide, with per-audience ask counts on top: how many times it was asked, by how many distinct people, and how recently. Asking again does not create a second question — it raises the demand on the one that exists, and that demand is what sorts the queue.

Open or answered

A question is in exactly one of two states, and the state is simply whether an answer is on record:

Open. Nobody has answered it — Mention tried your sources and came back empty, or nobody has settled it yet. Open questions live on their Audience's Gaps tab, and nowhere else. They are work, not reading material — and every one of them was asked by a real person, because Mention discards its own unanswerable seeds rather than leaving them open.

Answered. Your organization has an answer on record, with the facts it cites and when it was answered. Answered questions leave the Gaps tab and file under their topic, where anyone in the audience can read them. Mention picks that topic itself, from where the answer's own cited facts point — General when they point at no topic — and Filed under on the question's page is where you correct it.

An answered question earns its keep: when somebody asks it again, Mention serves the recorded answer with its citations, instantly, rather than generating a new one. If an owner has turned the question into a lesson, the answer also points onward to that article.

An answer can go stale — the facts behind it moved, because a source was deleted or a contradiction ruling retired a fact it cited. Mention re-answers from current knowledge a few minutes later. If the knowledge is genuinely gone, the question goes back to being open rather than quietly keeping a wrong answer.

Who answers

Mention answers what your sources support, and there is no question it holds back on. Nothing is gated on a human's permission first: a question held open waiting for approval is a question nobody ever gets an answer to. If a derived answer misreads your organization, that surfaces later as a contradiction — a correction somebody can make, on the record.

What Mention cannot answer stays open for a person. A member who is not an owner can still volunteer an answer — from Slack, for instance — and it is held as a proposal until an owner approves or rejects it. Proposals only ever come from people.

Topics

A topic is a glossary term carrying the Topic label — one of the eleven labels Mention assigns as it reads your sources. Nothing else marks a topic: there is no separate list to maintain, and no import step.

A topic is whatever your organization organizes its knowledge around, and that depends on what business you are in — a capability at a software company, a line of coverage at an insurer, a process somewhere else. Because topics are what the rest of the company asks about, they join the glossary early: a Topic candidate is promoted at two mentions rather than the usual five, and takes the first places in every promotion batch.

Mention also looks for topics that are plainly named. Things get boring names far more often than codenames, so an ordinary English word counts when your organization uses it as the proper name of something of its own — Sharing, Sandbox, Review Queue. The tells are that your company builds, ships, or runs it; that people say "the X" as though there were exactly one; and that it has a definite behavior somebody could get wrong. Capitalization helps Mention spot one, but it is not required.

What a topic holds

A topic groups two things, and it is thin by design — everything interesting lives on the lesson or the question, not on the topic:

  • Lessons — the Article–Lesson pairs written about it. There is no fixed set of slots: a topic holds however many pairs it has been given.
  • Questions — the answered ones, kept as ready inventory. When somebody asks one again, Mention serves the recorded answer instantly, and every ask is counted. The most-asked surface on the FAQ; open questions are on their Audience's Gaps tab.

Lessons appear grouped by topic on the Lessons page, most-asked topics first. Topics have no pages of their own — a topic is how the material is grouped and counted, not a place you visit. A topic's definition is Mention's own, written from your sources and refreshed as the topic keeps coming up; it appears wherever the term does.

General

General is the last group on the Lessons page, and it holds anything filed under no topic at all. It appears when it has something in it, which is what stops navigation ever losing a lesson.

General is not a topic. It has no definition and none of a topic's bookkeeping — it is the name for the residue. Filing an entry under a real topic later is a pointer move that changes nothing else about it.

The FAQ

The FAQ sits beside the conversation on Chat: the Audience's ten most-asked answered questions, each with how many times it has been asked. Clicking one drops the question and its recorded answer straight into the thread — served on the spot, no waiting and no credits. For a learner it is the shortest path to what colleagues keep asking; for an owner the counts are the demand signal — what people actually want to know. Owners also get Turn into a lesson on each entry.

On mobile the same list sits in an empty Chat thread, and an owner's copy of it — with Turn into a lesson — sits in their Chat.

Seeded questions

When an Audience is created, Mention writes up to ten questions someone in that audience will need answered to do their job. They are grounded in your organization's topics, informed by the questions the owner gave the Audience — never restating them — and shaped by the industry you chose during setup. Seeding happens once per Audience, quietly, and nobody is notified that it happened.

Each seed belongs to its Audience from birth. It was written for that readership, so there is no routing guess to correct later.

Then every seed is put to the test: your corpus gets first refusal. Each question is attempted against your knowledge base. One your sources can answer is answered on the spot and files under its topic — ready inventory, served instantly with its citations when somebody later asks it. One your sources cannot answer is deleted, silently. A seed never stands as an open question: every open question a person sees was actually asked by someone, and knowledge gaps are raised by real asks only.

A seeded question carries no asks until somebody actually asks it.

Mention never seeds an Audience a second time.

The Gaps tab

An Audience's open questions live on its own page. Owners (and org admins) get a Gaps tab on the Audience, with a matching Gaps entry in the sidebar badged with the count. It holds the questions owed to that Audience — real asked-but-unanswered demand, most-asked first. Each card carries Answer (write your own), Answer with…, Approve / Reject for a proposal, Dismiss, and a Routed to control that names the Audience owning the question and moves it to another.

Org admins additionally see a Needs routing group pinned at the top: questions Mention could not place with any Audience. Assigning one from its Routed to control moves it onto the right Audience's tab, where its owners take over.

There is no read/unread state — a question leaves the tab when somebody answers or dismisses it.

Answer first, file later

You never have to decide which topic a question belongs to. Write the answer, and it is on record for every audience that asked; Mention files it from the facts that answer cites. Filing is a pointer, corrected over MCP as often as you like. A question that has already become a lesson takes the pair with it.

Answering consumes credits, since Mention does a small amount of writing to turn your answer into a fact. Dismissing is free. Dismiss sets a question aside for one Audience only; it is not a delete, and the question comes back if somebody asks again. See Understanding Credits.

Conflicts

Conflicts sits in the sidebar for org admins; an owner who is not an admin sees it scoped to the conflicts routed to their Audience. It holds the contradictions only a person can settle — the same name the mobile app uses — in two tabs:

  • Misunderstandings — somebody said something your sources contradict. Confirm your docs, mark them stale, or say it is not a conflict.
  • Source conflicts — two things your sources say that cannot both be true. Mention can find the pair; it cannot know which one you meant. Pick the surviving fact on each card and submit them together; see Reviewing Contradictions.

The sidebar badge counts the pending contradictions. When both tabs are clear it says "Nothing needs you." — Mention keeps drafting, refreshing, and watching your sources on its own, and only interrupts you for a decision.

Turning a question into a lesson

Some answers are worth more than an entry in an archive. On the FAQ, an owner gets Turn into a lesson on any entry: Mention writes an Article from your knowledge base using the recorded answer as the brief, and composes its Lesson from that article, exactly as it would for anything else in the audience's contents. The pair is filed under the question's topic. A frequently asked question is exactly the demand signal a lesson should come from — the counts on the FAQ tell you which ones.

Three things worth knowing:

  • It is the owner's call. Mention does not suggest promotions and does not block one. The question somebody actually asked is the question you were asked, and nothing stops you.
  • It happens once, one way. A promoted question keeps pointing at its pair from then on; its FAQ entry links to the lesson. There is no second promotion and no un-promoting.
  • The provenance sticks. The lesson shows the question it came from, so a reader can see the article exists because somebody asked.

Over MCP

manage_unanswered_questions mirrors the Gaps tab and the Conflicts page over MCP: list the open questions in the same order the web app shows them, then answer, assign_topic, route, dismiss, approve_proposal, or reject_proposal. Audience owners pass an audience_id they own; org admins may omit it for the org-wide queue. Questions Mention could not place with an audience are marked "needs routing" in the list, and route moves one to the audience that should own it.

read_audience returns an audience's contents grouped by topic with General last, with each topic's answered questions alongside its lessons. read_concept returns one term's definition and, for a topic, its questions with their state and the article any promoted question became.

See MCP Tools Reference.