[bjourne]

Edited frequently about 2002-2004. About Israel. At that time, Wikipedia was so young and sparsely populated that it was still possible to make great advances on such a contentious topic despite hugely different point of views.

Then the trolls came, pov pushers and various ideologues who thought that the best way to push their view on wikipedia was to make "the other sides" editors be as miserable as possible. People that don't really care about history or facts or even being right as long as their side wins.

So every edit or addition became stuck in discussions on talk pages or the mailing list. Lots of slurs about editors being anti-semites, racism etc.. Not only from trolls but also from admins. Thing is, when you want to write stuff you're at a distinct disadvantage versus those who likes to delete it. It can take you days to research a single paragraph while people who don't like you just have to spend a few minutes coming up with a reason why it's off-topic for the article, biased or something else. Then the ones with the most political clout in the Wikipedia establishment wins.

You also can't start a fresh on Wikipedia. If you edited about Israel (or Palestine for that matter) and upset some people, they will follow you around and try to find reasons why your edits suck even in totally different topic areas.

It's incredibly frustrating experience and huge amount of work. So you'll ask yourself what's the point? Unless you're a fanatic the answer is "absolutely no fucking point" so you let the extremists have their way and spend your time with more fullfilling hobbies!

[zalew]

Not that you're wrong, but it should be no suprise when you engaged in edit wars on one of the most touchy subjects on earth.

[mjn]

That's generally been my experience, that editing contentious topics on Wikipedia is roughly average for the topic, rather than having any strongly Wikipedia-specific characteristics. Sometimes better than elsewhere, sometimes worse.

I've been on committees in academia to co-write overviews of subjects in which there is some contentious debate, even in the computer-science sense of political rather than real-world politics, and they have not all been straightforward or enjoyable experiences. If 10 people have very different views of a subject, where several of them hold the views strongly, and we are collaboratively supposed to write a neutral overview of a topic, it takes a lot of work and negotiation to reach any kind of agreement.

I suspect if you were to select 10 experts in the I/P conflict from across the ideological spectrum, and put them in a room for a week, asking them to replace a few of these Wikipedia articles with better ones, you would not get anything better, if anything at all. You might get some fistfights!