Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

What is the general policy for setting default descriptions? The reason I ask is because I noticed that this book's default had been recently set to Polish. Now I've just updated the default back to English and have just added the Polish description back to the Polish book (it seems like an easy mistake, to click the "default" box when updating descriptions). Now was this the right thing to do? And what is the usual policy regarding books that were originally written in English and is there a different one for ones that are translated into English?

I don't think we have an established policy, per se. Also, some amount of setting descriptions to default is automated, and may appear to have been set by a librarian when they actually edited a different field. (When a given edition has no description, the system tries to give it one.)

All that said, most default descriptions will be in English. However, if a given work has primarily been published in another language, it may make sense for that work's default to be in that language. For the example you gave, English seems most appropriate, though, so what you did sounds exactly right.

Cool, it makes sense that some parts of the system would be automatic (hence why sometimes there's a blank description as default). Anyway, thanks for the feedback! :)