Thread:Project:Support desk/Limit or disable history

My Special:Version page reads:
 * MediaWiki 1.16.5
 * PHP 5.3.5 (apache2handler)
 * MySQL 5.5.8

My question. Is it possible to limit or disable the history portion of mediawiki? I would prefer that I can limit the historical changes to the 5 most recent and to purge older revisions automatically. If this is not possible, can I simply disable the history portion of the mediawiki? And if neither of these options are possible, is there a way that I can manually run a purge command?

Thank you for your help on this matter.