Any ideas or hints how mass deletion of articles can be accomplished
by
date, by author and by namespace? THX, HeinzJ
You can use maintenance\deleteBatch.php which accepts a file where each line is a page title, including the namespace prefix, to delete. To create the list you will need write the required SQL; do you need some hints on this? You can use MySQL Query Browser tool to export the results to a text file, though you will need to format the file to be suitable for deleteBatch.php. For example MySQL Query Browser 1.1.20 will output the following:
"page_title","page_id" "Announcements",28650 "Contribute",28649 "Features",28740 "Highest_rated_pages",28700 "Main_Page",1
from the query: select page_title from pages where page_namespace=0 you will want to format it to:
Announcements Contribute Features Highest_rated_pages Main_Page
You can use: sed -e "1,1d" -e "/^$/d" -e "s/"//g" -e "s/,[0-9]*//" to achieve this. I have not investigated if you can export the results from the mysql cmd prompt and avoid having the extra step with sed.
Matt
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org