diff --git a/docs/topics/settings.rst b/docs/topics/settings.rst
index 2a1d9aeb2..10d80008f 100644
--- a/docs/topics/settings.rst
+++ b/docs/topics/settings.rst
@@ -905,11 +905,13 @@ or subclass the StatsCollector class).
 STATS_DUMP
 ----------
 
-Default: ``False``
+Default: ``True``
 
-Dump (to log) domain-specific stats collected when a domain is closed, and all
-global stats when the Scrapy process finishes (ie. when the engine is
-shutdown).
+Dump (to the Scrapy log) the :ref:`Scrapy stats <topics-stats>` collected
+during the crawl. The spider-specific stats are logged when the spider is
+closed, while the global stats are dumped when the Scrapy process finishes.
+
+For more info see: :ref:`topics-stats`.
 
 .. setting:: STATS_ENABLED
 
diff --git a/scrapy/settings/default_settings.py b/scrapy/settings/default_settings.py
index 6a072b063..9ff886d1d 100644
--- a/scrapy/settings/default_settings.py
+++ b/scrapy/settings/default_settings.py
@@ -246,7 +246,7 @@ SQS_REGION = 'us-east-1'
 
 STATS_CLASS = 'scrapy.statscol.MemoryStatsCollector'
 STATS_ENABLED = True
-STATS_DUMP = False
+STATS_DUMP = True
 
 STATS_SDB_DOMAIN = 'scrapy_stats'
 STATS_SDB_ASYNC = False