“Functional” would not be the right word to use, because I skipped hundreds of pages of rule lawyering on talk pages, and even after Ryulong was kicked off he still told his friend on the admin team to keep preventing his pet pages from edited.

Wikipedia’s rules are so arcane and self-contradictory that the power users can rule lawyer their way into justifying nearly everything, whereas normal people just don’t want to deal with these things.