So, I was asked to purge all the pages in several categories. The smaller categories are relatively easy to do using the API sandbox.

1. Visit the Special:ApiSandbox page on your wiki..
2. Select the action purge.
3. Select action=purge from the sidebar.
4. Look for the generator option and then select allpages from the drop down.
5. Return to the top of the page and select generator=allpages from the sidebar.
6. Look for the gapnamespace option and select the namespace you want to purge.
7. Execute the request using the “Make request” button at the top of the page.
8. When the request is complete, there may be the opportunity to repeat the request with the next batch of pages. You’ll see a button at the bottom of the JSON output that says “Continue”. Click it until the entire namespace has been purged.

The API sandbox will let you play around with different parameters. For example, in the last screenshot, I set gaplimit (under generator=allpages) to 3 but I could have set it as high as 500 if I wanted.

So for namespaces that don’t have too many pages (say, less than 1000), this is do-able. But for your average-sized wiki, a namespace is likely hold tens of thousands of pages. Something more is needed.

Next, purging namespaces programatically.