Manual:nukeNS.php

<td class="mw-version-versionbox" title="<translate nowrap> The latest stable version is <tvar name=1>1.41</tvar></translate>">

<translate> ≥</translate> 1.10

<translate> MediaWiki version:</translate>

MediaWiki file: nukeNS.php
Location:	maintenance/
Source code:	master • 1.41.1 • 1.40.3 • 1.39.7
Classes:	NukeNS

Details

nukeNS.php file is a maintenance script to remove all pages with only one revision (by default) from the MediaWiki namespace , without flooding recent changes, deletion logs, etc. It has originally been added to remove the content of unchanged interface texts from the MediaWiki namespace, but it can be used to basically delete all pages from any namespace.

Options/Arguments

Option	Description	Required?
--delete	Actually delete the pages and their revisions. Without this option, the script works in dry-run mode.	<translate> Optional</translate>
--ns	Namespace to delete from. Defaults to the MediaWiki: namespace. You must provide the namespace number, not the name. See Manual:Namespace for a list.	<translate> Optional</translate>
--all	Delete pages regardless of revision count. With this option, not only pages with only one single revision, but also pages with more than one revision will be deleted.	<translate> Optional</translate>

Usage

php maintenance/nukeNS.php [ --delete| --ns| --all ]

Checking potential deletion

Terminal

$ php maintenance/nukeNS.php --ns 6

delete: File:Screenshot 2022-03-11 at 1.47.10 PM.png
delete: File:Screenshot 2022-03-11 at 3.58.05 PM.png
delete: File:Screenshot 2022-03-11 at 3.58.12 PM.png
To update the database, run the script with the --delete option.

Making deletion