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historical reference.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.