Manual:Removing embarrassment

Certainly, people can post bad things onto a wiki, a message board, or a mailing list. Yes they didn't heed the warning, didn't follow the rules. Didn't ... anyway yes, we have of course edited out the words in question, but there they still are, still accessible in old revisions and RecentChanges. How can we clean up such embarrassing matter from our MediaWiki installation?

Cleaning up embarrassing words in an old revision

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, use RevisionDelete.

Also the maintenance/deleteOldRevisions.php maintenance script can mass-delete all old revisions of pages and their associated text records.

Cleaning up an IP address

• 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. He is begging me to expunge his IP... What is the best way?

Use RevisionDelete to hide the editor's username (in this case an IP).

See also

• Extension:Nuke
• Manual:FAQ#How do I delete an old version of a page?