  Given the vast number of repositories hosted on GitHub, project discovery and
retrieval have become increasingly important for GitHub users. Repository
descriptions serve as one of the first points of contact for users who are
accessing a repository. However, repository owners often fail to provide a
high-quality description; instead, they use vague terms, the purpose of the
repository is poorly explained, or the description is omitted entirely. In this
work, we examine the current practice of writing GitHub repository
descriptions. Our investigation leads to the proposal of the LSP (Language,
Software technology, and Purpose) template to formulate good descriptions for
GitHub repositories that are clear, concise, and informative. To understand the
extent to which current automated techniques can support generating repository
descriptions, we compare the performance of state-of-the-art text summarization
methods on this task. Finally, our user study with GitHub users reveals that
automated summarization can adequately be used for default description
generation for GitHub repositories, while the descriptions which follow the LSP
template offer the most effective instrument for communicating with GitHub
users.
