Talk:951 Gaspra

I thought it might be a good idea to open up a talk about the issue of whether to call asteroid pages like this "951 Gaspra" or just "Gaspra." On the one hand, the version with the number is the technically accurate way of calling asteroids by name. But on the other, when people actually go looking for an asteroid in an encyclopedia, I suspect they just do a search for the name alone; catalogue number is one of the things I would expect the asteroid's entry to tell me, rather than be one of the things required to find/link to it.

Personally, my preference is to start off asteroid articles named after just their name, without the number, and if this name later conflicts with another article we should turn that page into a disambiguating page and use the number for the asteroid's article. See, for example, Eros. Bryan Derksen

Sounds good to me. I really can't think of another use of the word "gaspra" that would be included in an encyclopedia. I will provide a redirect to this article from the proper name - this can be easily reversed if and when the naming issue comes up. -maveric149