How to anonymise MW database? - MediaWiki-l

28 Sep 2013

Hi all,

Just as a safety net I'd like to publish copies of the databases
powering my MediaWiki installations, so that if I lose all my data and
backups, I might still be able to get something back (as well as
reassuring my users that their contributions won't be lost forever!)

I don't want to publish the raw database dump because it contains
people's e-mail addresses and password hashes, but I'm thinking that
perhaps if I take a copy of the database and erase the values in those
tables, I might be able to export and publish the 'anonymised' copy.
I'd rather not omit the user table entirely, because if I do ever need
to restore the wiki from this copy I'll need it to associate the right
account with each edit.

Does anyone know which fields contain sensitive data that I should
remove? I can see these obvious candidates:

  user.user_password
  user.user_newpassword
  user.user_email
  user.user_token
  user.user_email_token

Are there any others that are potentially confidential and should not
be made public?

Many thanks,
Adam.