This is ugly! Following instructions at the MediaWiki.org site, you can make it simpler and nicer:

To achieve that, add the following to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

Then add/modify the following at /var/lib/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php (again, Debian default path):

Recall that you must have two “directories”, which in the example above are /w and /wiki. The former is “real” and the latter is “virtual”.

The real dir (the one used as value for $wgScriptPath) must contain the MediaWiki files, thus it must point to the /usr/share/mediawiki dir. To this end, it must either exist in the Apache root (usually /var/www/), or be an alias. If you follow the first route, you can make a link, like in the following example:

The second route would imply adding this line to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

The latter requires restarting the Apache daemon, but I personally prefer it.

The virtual dir (the one used as value for $wgArticlePath) will be our path to get rid of the URL ugliness, and point directly to an article’s title. As such, it must be aliased in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf adding the following line to it, as mentioned above:

Finally, you shold enable the rewrite PHP module, if it’s not enable already, and reload Apache:

After that, pointing to website/wiki/somearticle should lead you to the wiki page for somearticle. For more information, refer to the MediaWiki.org site.

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