Question

I’m working with the mediawiki API ( e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php) and I would like to be able to ‘truncate’ the mysql tables in order to reset the local installation while keeping some tables (users, ?…).
What would be the SQL queries ?

I would say: tuncate all the tables but ${PREFIX}_user and update ${PREFIX}_user set user_editcount=0 ?

Any other(safer) suggestion ?

Answer 1

The correct answer was posted on the MediaWiki mailing list: see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2009-October/032322.html

According to that post, it is probably ok to truncate user_newtalk, page, revision, text,
archive, pagelinks, templatelinks, imagelinks, categorylinks, category, externallinks, langlinks, hitcounter, watchlist, image, oldimage, filearchive, recentchanges, searchindex, interwiki, querycache, objectcache, log_search, trackbacks, job, querycache_info, redirect, querycachetwo, page_restrictions, protected_titles, page_props, change_tags, tag_summary, valid_tag, l10n_cache.

On more recent versions, add msg_resource and msg_resource_list to that list, to truncate message related caches.

Also: Remember to delete the files at the image folder, if truncating the
image table. Otherwise they will be out of sync, and you might have trouble uploading some images.