How to permanently delete a page from a MediaWiki wiki?

Question

I administer a MediaWiki wiki that has been hit by a ton of spam. I've managed to get rid of the spam pages that have been added to the wiki by using an extension, but the pages' data is still present in the wiki's MySQL database. This is bloating the database to over 3GB.

Is there a way to permanently delete the spam pages from the wiki, so that they are completely removed from the database?

Answer 1

Run the maintenance script named deleteArchivedRevisions.php.

Note that running MediaWiki maintenance scripts normally requires shell access to the server you're running MediaWiki on. If you don't have that (which might be the case on some cheap shared hosting setups), you can try using the MaintenanceShell extension instead.