[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!