Will using a meta description hurt me?

I'm writing an engine for a website and I'm considering whether to add a field to开发者_开发知识库 let the author write a description of the page or not. If I decide to do this, it will be used as the meta description.

Google (and possibly other search engines) usually displays it in the search results, instead of the snippets. I'm wondering if that's a good thing or not.. The website will have fairly long articles, and while they can certainly be summarized in 2 lines maybe it's better if the user is shown the part relevant to his or her search query.

So, does using a meta description actually hurt?

It'll only hurt if the data entered manually is worse than what Google would've automatically pulled out of your page.

I'd say it's a question of wether or not your users are up to the responsibility/realize the impact of editing it. However, I do think a summary of the article content rather than a freely edited irrelevant text would be the better way to go.

Maybe populate it with article stub by default, but give the ability to edit it.