8 May 2007

This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format

NukeDPL extension

A new special-page extension has been made today called NukeDPL which is based on Brion Vibber's Nuke extension. The original allows sysops to list all new pages created by a particular user or IP address, and delete selected items from the list. NukeDPL uses the same delete-from-list methodology, but allows the list of deletion candidates to be selected by a DPL query.

I used this to remove all the old XmlWiki XML-properties articles, about 1500 of them in all. I did it in smaller sets using the DPL count parameter to test the extension and it seems to work reliably for blocks of around 500 articles or less. The total number of pages went from around 8000 to about 6500, but the good-page-count has remained the same at 2080 because the XML articles contained no wiki links.

All deleted article's histories will be purged from the database (probably by using the SpecialDeleteOldRevisions extension) which should greatly reduce our backup size.

• The code for the new extension is SpecialNukeDPL.php
• See MW:Extension:NukeDPL for details on usage and installation.