Talk:Olivia

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[edit] What to include, what to omit?

When I started this article, I decided to leave out many Olivias, such as Olivia Newton-John. I planned to include only those Olivias who were known professionally by the single name "Olivia", rather than to try to include everyone who was named "Olivia". Olivia Newton-John isn't normally known by the single name "Olivia", whereas Olivia Longott and Olivia Lufkin are.

It seemed to me that to try to create or maintain a complete list of people named "Olivia" would be impractical. I did a wikipedia search for "Olivia" a few days ago and there were dozens of entries for people whose first name

For consistency, I'm tempted to remove Olivia Newton-John, Olivia de Havilland, Olivia Forsyth, Olivia Goldsmith, and Olivia Jones. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like it would hurt anything to leave them there.

Does anyone else have any opinions on this? -- Dominus 14:48, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes. I restored some of those to the article because they had got lost in the recent Olivia (Wrestler) renaming, but I wasn't sure about their usefulness. I would agree with you that one could remove all those who, on the basis of their own articles, aren't normally called simply "Olivia". Andrew Dalby 19:23, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Origin of name

A recent addition stated:

The name Olivia comes from the Spanish origin. In Spanish The meaning of the name Olivia is: Olive.

This contradicted the preceding paragraph, which stated that "Olivia" was a feminine form of Oliver. The addition was uncited, and the OED says that "Oliver" is not related to olives: "Presumably ult. of Germanic origin, and unrelated to Old French oliver, olivier olive tree." So I removed it.

I also deleted the uncited numerological additions, on the grounds of "patent nonsense" or something like that.

-- Dominus 15:30, 14 December 2006 (UTC)