Lock all usernames from imported XML dump

Question

I’m forking a wiki, therefore I have imported an XML dump in a fresh MediaWiki installation.

This dump also contains revisions and user pages (in the User: namespace), which I want to keep. So there are many links that lead to (existent as well as non-existent) user pages.

However, as I don’t have access to the user database of the original wiki, I have no chance to reserve these usernames for their original owners. So to prevent that someone registers in my wiki with a username that was used in the original wiki (so this new user would automatically own all revisions done by the old user with the same name), I want to lock all previously used usernames.

How could I do this?

As there are more than hundred users, I don’t want to solve this manually.

Answer 1

You can use the unix tools grep, sed, sort, and uniq to pull out all the user names from the dump.

Each users has a page with <title>User:User Name</title> in the dump. You can pull them all out with these commands:

• grep '<title>User:' -- Pull out just the titles of the user pages
• sed 's/.*User://g;s|</title>||g;s/\r//g' -- Strip it down to just the user name
• sort -- alphabetize them
• uniq -- remove duplicates (it is a history file)
• perl -p -e "s/\\n/','/g" -- replace the newlines with ',' to make it easy to stick in the $wgReservedUsernames array

Putting it all together:

grep '<title>User:' my-wiki-dump-history.xml | sed 's/.*User://g;s|</title>||g;s/\r//g' | sort | uniq | perl -p -e "s/\\n/','/g"

I tested this by downloading a dump from archive.org and testing against the included history XML file. A 500MB file should pose no problems for this method.