In the maintenance
directory of your MediaWiki installation, there are a host of PHP scripts that can be run by the sysop to do various maintenance tasks. While these scripts can be extremely helpful, there are two unfortunate facets regarding them. First, most of these scripts have little to no documentation regarding them, so you are on your own when it comes to learning how to run them. Second, and most important, these scripts are designed to be run from the server's command line or terminal shell. For those of us who are using a hosting provider, we may be out of luck when it comes to accessing this tool as the host company doesn't really want people who don't work for them messing with their server configurations.
Fortunately, someone wrote a neat little extension that will allow us to emulate a command line session so we can run these scripts without ruining the server it runs on.
Note
For a complete listing of the Maintenance scripts, visit http://www.mediawiki...