description: Sign a block or a page to credit who wrote it, distinct from who it addresses. tags: glossary maturity/experimental references:
An author is an Identity you credit. A signature is an At-Mention used the other way around: an @mention addresses someone, while a signature credits someone. The same identities serve both — anyone you can mention, you can also sign as, including yourself.
-- @name notationEnd a line or block with -- @name — or the em dash — @name, or the en dash – @name — to sign it.
Rules:
-- @zef followed by more text on the same line is not a signature. A single newline is enough.-- @ada @zef credits both.A signature is not a Recipient At-Mention. It does not enter somebody’s Mention Inbox. Instead, it attributes the text it signs: every @mention in that text is stamped with a by value naming who signed it, and the signature emits its own authored relation.
“The block it ends” is usually the enclosing paragraph, list item, task, blockquote, or HTML comment. If a paragraph continues after a signed line, the signature credits the text before it on that line, while the following line remains unsigned. When a signature stands alone on its own line, it applies to the surrounding comment, list item, or blockquote instead of claiming just the empty-looking line it sits on, so the whole exchange above it is credited, not only the last line.
authors: frontmatterDeclaring authors: in a page's frontmatter credits the whole page, the same way recipients: addresses the whole page:
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authors: ["ada", "zef"]
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A wiki-link value in authors:, like [ada](<ada>), is not a name and is silently ignored — unlike recipients:, which keeps a wiki link as an ordinary page link.
This does not cascade down to unsigned blocks in the page body: an @mention written elsewhere on the page without its own -- @name stays unattributed. Frontmatter authors: is page-level credit only — crediting a specific block still needs an inline signature on that block.
Rather than typing the notation by hand, run Mention: Sign (or the /sign slash command) to append -- @you to the end of the current block. This is what lets a person — or an agent — answer a mention without re-queuing the reply in their own inbox: signing a reply attributes it, it does not address it, so it never becomes a fresh request to yourself.
Nothing checks a signature against who is actually editing. Anyone with write access can type -- @zef whether or not they are Zef — SilverBullet takes it at face value, the same way it takes an @mention at face value. If you need to know who actually changed something, that's what commit attribution is for: it's held server-side and derived from the account that made the change, not from text anyone can type.
A signature is documentary, not a credential — useful for finding and querying who a piece of prose is by, but nothing security- or access-relevant should ever be decided based on one.