Extension:UTurn

The UTurn extension returns an entire wiki to its state at a previous point in time. Used for forgotten wikis that become overrun with spam (i.e. wikis used by a professor for a class).

About
There are a handful of situations when a MediaWiki install has to be locked for some period of time. Unfortunately, many times people forget to lock their wikis; they forget to close registration; they forget to keep moderating. An example might be a course website during the summer: once final exams come around, the professor forgets to close their wiki's registration, or moderate it. Then when they return to it at the start of a new semester, they realize that spam bots have infested it and filled the pages with links and spam.

Then, they realize that they should of blocked registration, or done something. But by then it is too late. By then the spam is there, and now they are trying to figure out what to do.

UTurn is a MediaWiki extension that allows sysops to return a wiki to how it was at a specified point in time.

UTurn is a standard MediaWiki extension written in PHP with a tiny bit of javascript for the front end.

Usage
Once installed, simply visit `myWiki/Special:UTurn` while logged in as a sysop to UTurn the wiki.

Details
UTurn works by listing through all the pages in the wiki and creating a new revision that matches the text of the page at the time you are UTurning to.

For more details see: https://github.com/berkmancenter/wiki-uturn/blob/master/documentation.md