In my spare time at Redwerks I've been working on a Short URL configuration tool:
http://shorturls.redwerks.org/
Our Short URL manual pages have been VERY bad for quite awhile. Every last one of them has bad practice on them and I only managed to fix one of them.
Considering how we have so many different manual pages simply because people have slightly different configuration requirements (eg: One for /w and /wiki/ another for / and /wiki/, another for /subpath/wiki, etc... One for .htaccess, another for Alias in Apache config, another for RewriteRule in Apache config, another for Nginx, etc...) rather than trying to fix I started writing a tool to build the configuration instead.
The tool tries to auto-detect as much as possible (practically everything in fact). Everything from the type of server, the sapi (mod_php vs. ?), your scriptpath, etc... it even tries to jump ahead of you and guess what kind of article path you were intending to use. It even has an early feature to try and preemptively detect if you're likely to have root access or no root access (The idea is to detect what kind of host you're on using the reverse dns for the server you're on).
The configuration generator actually isn't really a simple thing. There are a lot of conditionals involved in the tool. It can handle the special cases needed for root /$1 style urls. It knows how to add an extra rewrite when you use /w and /wiki and need / to redirect to your wiki. It uses Apache's %{DOCUMENT_ROOT} in RewriteRules but also lets you expand an absolute docroot when you use an Alias (you can't use %{DOCUMENT_ROOT} there). I've loaded the Nginx config full of deny rules and conditions that most people never bothered to properly configure (and yes, it can handle root urls, and even knows how to stop Nginx from executing php in uploaded files). Heck, this tool can actually handle TWN's wacky /w/i.php script path.
The tool is definitely beta right now. I have Apache and Nginx support written. I'll probably want to have some discussion with Lighttpd and ISS users to fix the configuration some of them are using and add code to the tool to support those types of servers. There are still some conditions it might not handle just yet. For example I haven't written the code to handle root style urls in root Apache config files.
Feel free to start using it when you setup a MediaWiki installation. I'd love to know when configuration doesn't work and what kind of tweaks I need to make to it. As well I'd like to see how the configurations handle different shared host setups, etc... I'd also like to see people on different hosts, both shared host users and VPS, Dedicated, etc... users running Apache jump in and make use of the yellow message's question on whether you're in a root or shared environment. If you use that specific feature it keeps track of reverse dns and the response, which I can use to try and preload rules to indicate what host's reverse dns patterns are for shared hosting users and what are for VPS servers and the like.