I think it would be good if players were asked to pick a shortdesc during character creation.
I recently had a situation where another character had one short desc when I first met them and another later on. Normally this is fine but the new short desc suggested a very different age then the original. Had this been set correctly to begin with my character would have probably acted differently towards them then they did. Normally hints in the character's description or @nakeds can help here but not in this case.
Just a thought!