User:Connor Behan

I am Connor Behan, born 1989-08-10. I can never pick a nickname for myself that I still favour several years later so I just use my real name on Wikipedia and most online communities. I started editing Wikipedia in 2006 with some very useless edits. In 2012, I decided to take on a more active role. My modus operandi is:

Every time I watch a movie, read a book or hear about a news item, I look up the Wikipedia article.
If it has grammatical mistakes, I correct them.
If a systematic problem with the article jumps out at me, I change it if I'm not short on time.
If another editor reverts my change without a good explanation, I revert it back.
I then start a thread on the corresponding talk page.
The people who reverted my edit get a bad first impression of me and voice their opposition.
Further discussion teaches them that I'm actually not such a bad guy and we reach some sort of compromise.

More information on my random obsessions can be found on my blog: Small Perturbation.

Friends

Of my friends IRL, at least four are Wikipedia editors:

Other pages

Bot bin - To keep my talk page more readable / relevant, I move discussions here if they consist of a generic form letter, a global message or something written by a bot.
Userboxen - For those who think that users should be sorted and categorized.

What I will not do

One thing on Wikipedia that I will probably never do again, is upload someone else's copyrighted picture. Even if there is no free alternative, Wikipedia is simply too hard nosed about the issue right now for me to consider it worthwhile. I've tried it before and no matter how well I tried to explain myself, my pictures always ended up being nominated for deletion. If you want to add a fair use picture to an article I create, more power to you. I hope it's allowed to stay without you having to constantly defend it.

Another thing I will not do is create an article about a TV show episode or fictional character. I have seen many articles like this get deleted for being non-encyclopedic and you know what? The people who deleted them were completely right! These articles are not encyclopedic at all! The episode articles that I see nowadays contain mostly in-universe information that only fans of the show care about. It is often copied from a fan wiki. And then to satisfy Wikipedia admins, they compromise by adding a small amount of real world information. Nobody actually reads the article for this information - it is usually something trivial like a Nielsen rating and these can be found on the show's main article anyway. You will not see me creating articles like this. However, if one of them stands the test of time (remains on Wikipedia for over a year without being deleted) you might see me edit it to make sure it doesn't suck.

What I have done

I think I have made significant contributions to the following articles or articles spun out from them:

Grammar cleanup

I have recently started making a number of minor edits that aim to rid Wikipedia of the following phrases:

"Irregardless" - > "regardless"
"Free reign" -> "free rein"
"Graced the cover" -> "appeared on the cover"
"Gets killed" -> "is killed"
"Got killed" -> "was killed"
"Gets raped" -> "is raped"
"Got raped" -> "was raped"
"With who he" -> "with whom he"
"With who she" -> "with whom she"
"Who I was close to" -> "to whom I was close".

Of the many phrases that exemplify poor grammar, these are the ones that are easy to search for. Please let me know if you can think of others (or if you have a problem with these edits).