Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct/Guidance
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historical reference. processes should be used for conduct issues. The RFC/U process has been discontinued as a result of this discussion. Other dispute resolution |
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
- 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 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/Assistanceto ask for input.
- You might also want to read some suggestions on how to present an RfC case.
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 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.