[Mediawiki-l] Bulk page deletion

[Paul Coghlan]

I am looking to replace a large number of pages with a newer version from
outside of my wiki. My plan is to delete the existing pages and then import
the new ones.

With the number of pages being deleted (@20,000) it is possibly going to be
easier to do it through SQL.

The thing is that there are numerous tables with entries relating to the
affected pages. Is there an easy way to remove pages en masse? Unfortunately
the 20k pages in question represent only a small portion of the wiki so I
ant simply empty tables.

Each of the pages in question contains the same phrase which is itself
unique. i.e. I am happy to delete all pages that include a specific phrase.
This will only, I think, remove entries from the searchindex and text
tables. Is there a way to detect all entries and remove them for these
pages?

Many thanks,
Paul