Manual:Maintenance scripts
Maintenance scripts are used to perform various administrative, import, maintenance, reporting and upgrade tasks.
The scripts are written in PHP and live in the maintenance subdirectory of MediaWiki installs.
MediaWiki contains over 200 maintenance scripts, which have varying degrees of general utility and quality. You should carefully read the documentation on a script before using it; if a script isn't documented, take additional care running it.
Since MediaWiki 1.40, maintenance scripts should be invoked indirectly through
maintenance/run.php. Invoking maintenance scripts directly will trigger a warning.