Php versions – Is there a way to do a "mass delete" of unused pages and pictures in Mediawiki. The deleteArchivedFiles.php is not working as expected

To get the list of unused files, use MediaWiki API:

https://mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&list=querypage&qppage=Unusedimages&qplimit=500&qpoffset=0.

This URL will fetch 500 records (qplimit) for unused files (qppage) from mediawiki.org (replace with your project) starting from 0 (qpoffset) in JSON format (format). XML is also available.

You can use jq (apt install jq) to parse JSON and extract full titles of file pages:

wget -cq -O - 'https://mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&list=querypage&qppage=Unusedimages&qplimit=500&qpoffset=0' | jq -r '.query.querypage.results[].title' >> list.txt

Or, you can simply grep:

wget -cq -O - 'https://mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&list=querypage&qppage=Unusedimages&qplimit=500&qpoffset=0' | grep -oP '(?<="title":")[^"]+' >> list.txt

You may need to repeat this increasing qpoffset by qplimit until there is nothing left in .query.querypage.results.

Assuming that you have collected the list of what you want to delete in the file list.txt, one entry per line, use the maintenance script php maintenance/deleteBatch.php -u "deleting user" -r "reason for deletion" list.txt.

Further reading:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Querypage#Special_page_values
• https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:DeleteBatch.php.