Our Pagination class inherits from the PageNumberPagination Django class. However, this base class as not ordering attribute. Thus, setting a default value wont have any effect on the code. Why did we end up passing a value to this non-existing attribute? Becasue we copy/pasted some code sources from Joanie, and Joanie also has this attribute set to a default value. If you take a look at DRF pagination style documentation, the only three attributes they set on the child class are 'page_size', 'max_page_size' 'page_size_query_param'. 'ordering' is not mentionned in the attributes you may override. However, the CursorPagination class offers the latter attribute, which may explain why we did end up setting this non-existing attribute in Joanie.