Someone stole Gollum-like into the Wikipedia "Middle-earth Canon" article and gradually adjusted it to the point where it now falsely claims the Tolkien Estate supports the idea of an official "Tolkien canon".

The canon article was originally proposed to govern the books that contributors to the Wikipedia Middle-earth articles would use as their authorities in documenting Middle-earth. No consensus was ever really reached on which books and excerpts should be used.

In fact, the entire Middle-earth project defied Wikipedia policy against "original research" (and continues to flaunt classic "original research" like these latest edits) in the face of Wikipedia community oversight.

The information provided by the Wikipedia articles is in many cases wrong or heavily biased to favor the points of view of 2 or 3 people who have long-standing histories of manipulating Tolkien citations for the sake of justifying their preconceived notions.

That said, the current Wikipedia Middle-earth articles have been reviewed and edited by some well-intentioned but not-very knowledgeable contributors who "assumed good faith" with respect to the majority of edits and contributions made to the Wikipedia Middle-earth entries. They, unfortunately, have been unable to rationalize keeping the Middle-earth canon article among others alive.

This latest round of edits appears to be an attempt by someone to prove to the Wikipedia editing community that Yes, Virginia, there really is an official Tolkien canon after all. The contributor even went so far as to link to the official Tolkien Trust Web site (and liberally uses the word "official" throughout the heavily modified article) to make the article appear to support the false statement that there is an official Tolkien canon.

The whole "canon" debate can be boiled down to the disagreement between fans over which books and stories should be used to study Tolkien's Middle-earth. Some people strenuously defend the practice of including The Book of Lost Tales (Tolkien's "mythology for England" which bears no connection to the Middle-earth he envisioned only years later) in any discussion of Middle-earth because Christopher Tolkien drew upon some of the stories in that collection when he compiled The Silmarillion.

The Silmarillion itself, now much questioned by Tolkien readers and scholars alike about its own legitimacy, is a much more appropriate canonical resource despite Christopher's extensive and self-admonished editing and compression.

The Silmarillion is not, as some people have argued, in any way a rewrite of The Book of Lost Tales. J.R.R. Tolkien certainly carried forward ideas for characters, themes, and plots but he started his legend-making anew and in no way expressed any intention to incorporate The Book of Lost Tales into his legendarium.

Tolkien's writings on the subject make it pretty clear that with each round of development in his myth-making he imagined an equivalent work to various foundational pieces from previous experiments -- hence, The Silmarillion holds a place in the mythology of Middle-earth equivalent to that for which he imagined for The Book of Lost Tales in the mythology of England.

The Wikipedia article needs to be deleted but lacking sufficient will and coherence from the Wikipedia community to acknowledge that the whole Middle-earth project has been a colossal waste of time and embarrassment (it is, at this point, little more than propaganda advocating a few people's collective point of view on numerous fan debates), about the best we can hope for is a reversion to a pre-false canon version for the copy.

This is exactly why people should not be using Wikipedia as a reference work. The "established facts" of the articles you link to change without notice or rational justification. There is no mechanism either in place or in the proposal process to help rectify these severe short-comings for Wikipedia.

No knowledgeable person in their right mind would claim there is an officially designated "Middle-earth canon". It just doesn't exist.