On 1/10/08, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@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.