Editors should keep in mind that short descriptions are meant to distinguish an article from similarly named articles in search results, and not to define the subject. Each description should provide a brief overview of the topic, a short annotation, and a way to differentiate it from other similarly titled articles.

Ideally, each page should have its own purpose-written short description. While the Shortdesc helper tool allows text to be imported from Wikidata, this should be done with caution as Wikidata descriptions do not follow Wikipedia policies and may be too long or too technical to be used as a short description. It is the editor's responsibility to ensure the short description is appropriate, accurate and compliant with Wikipedia's policies, particularly for biographies of living people and for medical articles.