mediawiki-l@, please
OK, sorry. Next time...
I don't
know why the design decision was made to just leave those
Mediawiki: namespace items sitting in the archive and text tables. But
Just run
update.php. It does all that crap for you.
I am sorry but update.php just calls deleteDefaultMessages.php which
just leaves them sitting in the text and archive tables forever!
It just does a courteous delete, leaving all 1500 yes, deleted, but
not expunged, forever.
If your wiki has been around since early 2007, have a look in your
archive and text database tables. The 1500 hundred message strings
should be very obvious there in the text table, and their
corresponding items in the logging and archive tables.
Years and years will go by and one day you get curious and look in the
database and surprise, for a small wiki perhaps 90% of the database is
occupied by useless bloat.