Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct/Guidance

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference.
The RFC/U process has been discontinued as a result of this discussion.
Other dispute resolution processes should be used for conduct issues.

Are you in the right place?

A request for comment on user conduct (an RfC/U) is for discussing specific users who have violated Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Carefully read the following before filing an RfC.

Disputes over the writing of articles, including disputes over how best to follow the NPOV policy, belong in Request comment through talk pages.
For feedback on your own activity at Wikipedia, you might try Wikipedia:Administrator review.
To report an offensive or confusing user name in violation of Wikipedia:Username policy, see subpage User names.
To report spam, page blanking, and other blatant vandalism, see Wikipedia:Vandalism.
Generally, see the dispute resolution process and its helpful advice about dealing with disruptive editors.
If you would like to get one-to-one advice, feedback or counseling from another editor, then you should consider editor assistance.

The nature of RfC/U

Please keep in mind that RFC/U is a non-binding, informal process.

What RfC/U CANNOT do is:

Impose/enforce involuntary sanctions, blocks, bans, or binding disciplinary measures;

What RfC/U CAN do is:

Allow a number of users to collaborate in discussing wider issues they see with a particular editor's conduct.
Allow an editor who is the subject of an RFC/U to understand the problems, and change or explain their conduct.
Allow users to share information which might be relevant for later steps in the dispute resolution process, should that become necessary.

An RfC is a tool for developing voluntary agreements and collecting information.
An RfC may bring close scrutiny on all involved editors. In most cases, editors named in an RfC are expected to respond to it. The Arbitration Committee closely considers evidence and comments in RfC if the editors involved in the RfC are later named in a request for arbitration.
See also RfC/U rules.

Steps to creating an RfC/U

Qualification

An RfC/U must be certified in the way outlined at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct#Minimum_requirements.
If you're not sure if anyone else has had the same issues with the editor in question, consider some other method of dispute resolution.
If others have had the same or related issues with the editor in question, you may wish to create a draft in your own user space that you may jointly work on. This will help frame the dispute in a way that will get to the heart of the issue.
Note that the RfC/U process is not generally used for relatively new users (under a couple hundred edits or so), although this is not a hard and fast policy. Before starting an RfC/U, you should check the edit count of the user involved.

Preparation

Spend some time looking through the Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct/Archive - get a feel for what happens.
Collect any data or notes you're likely to need.
Consider creating a draft first. To do this, create a page in your userspace (eg User:Example/draft), and add {{Userspace RFC draft}}. Then go to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct/Assistance to ask for input.
You might also want to read some suggestions on how to present an RfC case.

Creation

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct/Creation

Listing

Once you've created the RFC/U page, list it in the appropriate Candidate Pages section of Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct/UsersList.
Users who are the subject of an RfC should be notified on their talk page. This may be done with the template {{subst:ConductDiscussion}}.
Candidate pages need a second user to certify the dispute within 48 hours. Those that don't meet this criterion should be delisted, and marked for speedy deletion with the {{db-maintenance}} tag.
Once a second user has certified the dispute, it should be moved from the "Candidate pages" section to the "Certified pages" section of Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct/UsersList.