On 1/10/08, jidanni(a)jidanni.org <jidanni(a)jidanni.org> wrote:
A beloved user on my wiki has mistakenly edited while
not logged in,
leaving his company's IP address in the history of A_Sensitive_Article
and RecentChanges, etc.
(Next time the warning should be more noticeable.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12474 )
Anyway, he is begging me to expunge his IP... What is the best way?
Manually edit the database. Edit the revision metadata in the
revision table. That's basically what sysadmins do on Wikimedia when
such a request arises, that can't be handled through oversight.
I'm looking around maintenance/*. I see a lot of
dangerous looking
programs.
Hmmm deleteRevision.php, reassignEdits.php, look interesting.
But of course as with all maintenance/* programs, it is best to ask
here on this mailing list first as they might leave the database in
tatters.
I don't know how well-maintained some of those scripts are. I'd be
wary of using any that I'm not personally sure actually work as
advertised.
By the way, while we are on the subject, let's say
I have edited out a
sensitive URL, comment, etc. from the contents of one of my pages. But
that's not enough. It can still be read from the article's history.
Shall I use deleteRevision.php? (Kindly don't tell me to install
extensions, let's see how far we can get using just maintenance/*.
Hmmm, perhaps let's make a new page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Removing_embarrassment )
You can delete the page inside the wiki interface, and then undelete
all revisions except the problematic one. Then only sysops can see
it. If that's not enough, and you don't want to install Oversight,
edit the database. Again, this is what was done on Wikimedia before
Oversight existed.