Manual:Purge

Purging forces MediaWiki to clear the cached version of a given page, forcing the page to be redisplayed from its source or scripts to restart. It is used to ensure that recent changes are made immediately visible.

One way to "purge" a MediaWiki page is to click a page's "View history" tab, then in your browser's location field delete just the word "history" off the end of the URL, type "purge" (after the "=") on the end of the URL, and hit Enter. Your URL should look something like one of the ones below.

Examples

• To purge a page, add ?action=purge to the URL of the page you are viewing. For example:

http://example.org/wiki/Main_Page?action=purge

• If the URL has other parameters in its query string, add the purge action to the query string with an ampersand (&). For example:

http://example.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=purge

Remember to change example.org in the above URLs to the host name of your MediaWiki installation.

Requests must be confirmed

Purge requests made via POST are automatically filled. Users making purge requests via a query string will be presented with a confirmation form. This form must be submitted before the purge request will be completed. This behavior is a precaution to keep web spiders from accidentally purging pages when following links.

Purge and image thumbnails

If purge is run on an image description page, the cached thumbnails for the image will be purged.

Categories

MediaWiki version:

≥ 1.38 Gerrit change 756107

If purge is run on a category with less than 5000 members, the category will be recounted from scratch (T85696).

Null edits

See also: Help:Null edit

Purging will only update the rendering of the page, it won't update the link tables. These tables control lists that the page is listed in (for example, pages listed on category pages, Special:Whatlinkshere, along with several other "query" special pages). In order to force an update of the link tables, you can do what is called a null edit. Click on "Edit" and save without changing anything. No entry in the page's history will appear, but all link tables should be refreshed.

An alternative way to update the links table is to use the API's purge module with the forcelinkupdate option.

This option only applies to the API. Adding forcelinkupdate to an index.php URL has no effect.

Null edits are distinct from null revisions which are created automatically to represent loggable actions in the page history.

See also

• purgeList.php - a command-line maintenance script that allows batch purging of articles.
• Manual:Performance tuning
• Manual:Parameters to index.php
• Extension:Purge
• Manual:PurgeAction.php
• Require POST in ?action=purge
• Help:Locating broken scripts