User:Delete page script

This is the username used by the maintenance script DeleteBatch.php.

The script is part of MediaWiki; it is used to delete one or more batch(es) of pages. It is not a bot, at least in the traditional sense, and is not likely affected by blocks.

The script has the following usage notes:

php deleteBatch.php somepages.txt

(This will delete the pages contained in the text file "somepages.txt")

On a wiki farm with linked folders, change to folder containing LocalSettings.php and use:

php ./maintenance/deleteBatch.php  --conf ./LocalSettings.php -r "reason for deletion" ./deleteBatch.txt

Option/Parameter	Description
-u <user>	Username that will be shown in the log entries. If left empty, deletions will be attributed to the user called Delete page script.
-r <reason>	Reason for deletions. If empty, no reason will be shown in the logs.
-i <interval>	Number of seconds to sleep after each deletion.
<listfile>	A file (located in the maintenance directory) where each line contains the title of a page to be deleted.

Tips & tricks

In case the page titles contain special characters (like ä, ö, ü and so on), make sure to save the file in UTF-8 encoding. Otherwise the script may not be able to find the according page names inside the database!

You can create a pagelist with SQL as follows:

mysql -e "select page_title from page where page_touched between 20150431000000 and  20150519000000 and page_namespace = 0 into outfile '/tmp/pagelist.csv'"

This would create a list with all page titles touched between 2015-04-31 and 2015-05-19.

This might be helpful if your wiki got attacked by spambots, and other edits happened during that time.

Other namespaces

The above command only covers the Main namespace.

The mysql database may not know the prefix name of other namespaces, so we have to do them one by one.

For example, to delete all pages in the User namespace, with the deleteme category and no other text:

mysql -e "select concat('User:',p.page_title) from page p INNER JOIN revision r ON p.page_latest = r.rev_id INNER JOIN text t ON r.rev_text_id = t.old_id where t.old_text = '{{delete}}' and p.page_namespace = 2 into outfile '/tmp/deleteme-user.csv'"