Sam Ruby is looking for consensus on the handling of content:encoded and the description entry in RSS feeds. One se of thinking is to treat the description as a summary, and the content:encoded as the full text:

As to content:encoded , if people can come to a consensus on to the precedence rules regarding description and content:encoded , the Feed Validator will honor such consensus. 

The trouble is that "in the wild", usage is all over the map. I haven't looked lately, but back when I added support for content:encoded, it was typically the same content as description - it was just explicitly encoded. Given that, I treat them as the same in BottomFeeder, and have content:encoded override description. I suppose I could add a preference, but I don't see a compelling reason to do so at the moment.

Now, maybe if there was a real spec for RSS, this - like other issues in RSS - would go away. We all know that there's one man who, for utterly inexplicable reasons of his own, thinks that more specificity would be a bad thing.