What are tags and topics?

Tags are pieces of customizable metadata that you can attach to a goal or project, similar to hashtags in social media. Topics are collections of projects, goals, people, teams, help, and knowledge created by tagging a goal or project. Currently, every tag has exactly 1 equivalent topic that shares the name, but we’re looking into ways to improving topics to connect with multiple tags and other attributes.

The purpose of Topics is to aggregate a group of objects and represent something more meaningful to a reader than just a list of tagged items. Some common uses for tagging and creating topics include organizing work by program, department, product, areas of expertise, etc.

Creating and accessing topics

When you add a tag to a goal or project, a topic with the corresponding name is automatically created. Every topic has its own homepage where you can see what work is happening, who’s working on it, what knowledge they’ve gathered, and how it’s all going.

To tag a goal or project, go to its page and look for the section titled Tags in the right sidebar. From there, you can add or create new tags or view tags that have already been added to represent a topic.

It all starts from the Topic directory, where you can browse all topics in your workspace and discover new topics to follow. Alternatively, you can select any tag on any goal or project to go directly to the topic page.

What you can find on the topic page

When exploring a topic, there are a few important aspects to keep in mind:

• The Projects and goals tab shows an overview of the work happening within a topic and how it’s tracking, so you can quickly dig into whatever needs attention.

• The Help and knowledge tab curates learnings from projects, help links, and questions about a topic, making it easier to share and consume knowledge built up across the organization.

• The Updates tab shows the latest updates for all the projects and goals tagged with this topic, giving a customized feed of updates for anything related to that topic.

• The Top contributors and Teams who do the most work related to that topic are highlighted on the right sidebar of the topic page, celebrating their hard work and expertise but also creating a list of relevant experts to speak to.

• You can also Follow to topic to automatically see tagged updates in your main feed or Share the topic with team members. You can also copy the link to the topic, and embed a list of goals and projects associated with the topic in other Atlassian products.

FAQs

How do I manage and curate topics in my workspace?

Add topics by tagging projects, goals, questions, and help links in Atlas. Once a topic has been created, anyone can contribute to the knowledge in a topic by creating help links, asking questions, or tagging projects and goals with that topic. Topic names cannot be edited at this stage.

What's the difference between the topic homepage and the topic feed in Atlas?

When you follow a topic, you’ll see a feed for that topic in the left-hand sidebar in Atlassian Home. This feed will show the latest updates from projects and goals that have been tagged with that topic. Think of the topic feed as a way to quickly filter your All updates feed.

A topic’s homepage, accessible from the topics directory, aggregates all projects and goals and their updates, help and knowledge, and people. To view a topic’s homepage, just select a tag on a project or goal, or find the topic via the topics directory.