Edits on the Nurn page
Welcome to Tolkien Gateway. I appreciate your interest in contributing to Tolkien Gateway and that you tried to use references to support your edits. I agree that the Nurn page needed some improvements. You provided the comment "grammatical changes" to your edit on the Nurn page. However your edit did not correct any grammar mistakes. Instead your edit changed the description of the placement of Lake Núrnen from "in the middle of" Nurn to in the east of Nurn (in the infobox) and that Lake Nurnen laid in "in the centre of" Nurn to "in the east of" Nurn. You also changed "two maps of north-western Mordor" to "two maps of Mordor" in the description of the maps in the Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP) module Gorgoroth. This is incorrect, because those maps do not cover all of Mordor, they only cover the north-western part of Mordor (i.e. Udûn, Gorgoroth except the north-eastern part of Gorgoroth nort-east of Barad-dûr, Nurn only as far south as a bit more than to the unnamed river the flows from the west into Lake Núrnen, but not as far east as Lake Núrnen). The rest of your edit seemed to have merely rephrased the existing content to suit your personal preferences. Please keep in mind that often the borders of a region (e.g. Nurn) are not known if they are not mentioned in the text and J.R.R. Tolkien or Christopher Tolkien may have placed the labels for regions on the map without paying too much attention to have the labels extend over the whole region to which they refer. As a consequence, it is not known if Lake Núrnen was in the centre or in the east of Núrn. Also edits should not primarily rephrase existing content to suit one's personal preferences in order to avoid a larger number of edits on Tolkien Gateway. I made some edits to the Nurn page and I think that it is fine now. I deleted content that said where Lake Núrnen was located in Nurn, because we do not know the borders of Nurn and thus do not know where in Nurn Lake Núrnen was located. I also added a reason why Nurn most likely escaped the desolation caused by the eruption of Orodruin and provided the map of LOTR as the reference for that speculative statement. In addition, I added page numbers for the 50th annivery edition of the one volume edition of LOTR and replaced the numbers of the books and chapters with the abbreviations of the chapters in the references, which refer to LOTR. Akhôrahil (talk) 16:05, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
Edits on the Tharbad page
The practice that editors who have experience with a large number of edits on Tolkien Gateway frequently use the Recent changes function to review and correct recent changes is a common practice on Tolkien Gateway. Especially when a lot of content has been changed in edits and if there are a large number of problems in those changes, it is often less time consuming to revert the edit than to make a new edit, which tries to correct all the problems introduced by the previous edit by a new user.
What was "bad writing"?
It would be more helpful if you could specify what you mean with "bad writing" you corrected in your edits. What is considered good writing is a subjective judgement and thus may be considered differently by different readers.
Precise references
Precise references (i.e. citations) are the cornerstone of a high quality wiki encyclopedia, such as Tolkien Gateway. Precise references allow readers to check if the statements in the source in the reference support what is said in the parts of a sentence, the sentence or a paragraph on Tolkien Gateway. Robust citations should not be added later they should be at the very start of any high quality edit. Reading sources that were written by J.R.R. Tolkien and having them open next to the window in which you are editing is essential to make sure that what is changed or added is supported by those sources and makes it easy to add the reference directly with the edit.
Grammar mistakes and typos
It would be more helpful if you could specify which grammatical errors and typos you corrected in your edits. The Language section of the Tolkien Gateway:Manual of Style requires the use of British English with Oxford spelling for the content of articles. In contrast there are commonly accepted standards in dictionaries what is considered to be a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake (e.g. introduced by a typo or by a wrong guess by an autocorrection software), but they sometimes permit several spelling or capitalizing variants. For example you changed "river" before the names of river to "River". Which grammar rule for British English says that "River" with a capital R is the only correct spelling when using the word river before the name of a river if it is not at the beginning of a sentence? Keep in mind that J.R.R. Tolkien also used the names of rivers, such as the Gwathló, the Mitheithel or the Glanduin without the name of the river always beging preceeded by "River" or "river". This indicates that the word "river" is not an essential part of the name of the river. You also changed "re-established" to "reestablished". When you search for reestablish in the Oxford English Dictonary on oed.com, in the online Cambridge Dictionary, the online Collins Dictionary you receive only one result, which uses the spelling re-establish and no other results. Only the Cambridge Dictonary mentions reestablish as an alternative spelling variant. When you search for reestablish in the online American Merriam-Wester Dictionary dictionary you only get reestablish as a result with the spelling variant re-establish.
Guild of Venturers or Guild
You introduced speculative content concerning the Guild of Venturers (also seemingly just called Guild by you) without disclosing it as speculative (without a qualifying statement, such as "It is possible that ...") that "the Guild of Venturers" began harvesting the local timber" or "but it is known by the Guild that ships with a smaller draught could be sailed or rowed up the Gwathló as far as Tharbad". J.R.R. Tolkien did not specify which specific Númenóreans made trips up the Gwathló or harvested timber and whether they were members of the Guild of Venturers or whether they were just members of a ship on which Aldarion travelled or whether they were commanded by Aldarion to do so and doing it for him or for the purposes of the Guild. There was simply no need to mention the Guild of Venturers there about which very little was written by J.R.R Tolkien.
Reasons for draining the land around Tharbad
You introduced a speculative statement without any references that the land around Tharbad was later drained "to allow the construction of causeways, a bridge, a harbour and the town itself". J.R.R. Tolkien did not write that the drainage was necessary to build the causeways, the bridge or the town. In Appendix D of Concerning Galadriel and Celeborn it is only mentioned "to underake the great-works of drainage and dyke-building to make a great port on the site where Tharbad stood in the days of the Two Kingdoms" and " And in The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor in The Nature of Middle-earth it is only mentioned "In those days there were drainage works, and the banks of the Hoarwell and Greyflood were strengthened." It is possible that the drainage works were also needed to build the town, the causeways and the bridge, but is is also possible that they were not needed for the causeways and the bridge and that the construction of the bridge was possible with pillars and that further away from the banks of the rivers the causeways were still surrounded by fens. In fact J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in the Appendix D mentiond before "both kingdoms shared an interest in this region, and together built and maintained the Bridge of Tharbad and the long causeways that carried the road to it on either side of the Gwathló and Mitheithel across the fens in the plains of Minhiriath and Enedwaith." In addition you deleted the river-wardens, which were mentioned by Tolkien in The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor.
Recommendations for future edits
I could go on and provide detailed feedback on changes that you made, content that you added or content that you deleted, but that would be very time consuming. I was surprised that you did not ask why your edits were reverted and only seemingly "complained" that they were reverted. I recommend to start with shorter edits and to focus on correcting clear mistakes after having checked all available sources that were written by J.R.R. Tolkien and on adding missing references or on improving references and to be very careful about introducing speculative content and to disclose speculative content as such rather than phrasing it like a fact. Often it is better to first ask questions on an article's discussion page if you think that something may not be correct before editing the page. --Akhôrahil (talk) 10:48, 27 November 2023 (UTC)