It's fine as is but the standard way is the have mediawiki live in
subdir of the docroot like /w/ and then some other path (like /wiki/)
is where the pretty (aka short) URLs live.
Yes, heed Jeremy's advice, drop it in wiki/w/ which will allow for
wiki.thesii.org/w/index.php to work, then play with the rewrite. The manual is very specific about not using the directory /w. It will work, but can be problematic with some functions.
The subdomain deffinately exists!
Yes, it exists.
Yes it does, wiki.thesii.org/api.php is valid, but..see below.
As to what .htaccess would be complaining at, I'm at a loss. DNS has an
entry for wiki.thesii.org (else we would get the header site), apache tells
it where it is installed and the programme files are all in the correct
place?
Something is redirecting / and /index.php and other paths to
/index.php/Main_Page. That doesn't happen out of the box and you
should figure out what it is and disable it. First get MediaWiki
working at all and then worry about Short URLs. See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL when you're ready for
it.
-Jeremy
AMEN!
A call to wiki.thesii.org is returning a 301 moved permanently redirect. Where are you redirecting too?? This is why I said rename htaccess to turn it off and see if it will work without trying to rewrite the URLs.
Tom