Last modified: 2011-01-31 07:59:07 UTC
namespaceDupes.php & cleanupTitles.php can be necessary when making certain kinds of tweaks to the system, but they're kind of opaque. In addition to improving their CLI interfaces (eg but 27048), I think it would be beneficial to give these a web UI interface which can let local sysops / bcrats / stewards (or whoever) find and clean up broken pages without manual intervention from server maintainers. (For Wikimedia, this will mean less site-request bottlenecking: after a namespace tweak or other change that ends up causing problems, there'll be a larger pool of people who can fix it.) A web UI will also be better at providing interactive controls, eg to do batch checks / confirmations / resolutions of ambiguous states.
Doing this in a nice, generic, extendible way would be great ;)
The Maintenance Extension creates a web interface for making scripts like this. It might be a good idea to use that, clean it up, or just copy some of its ideas. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Maintenance