mediawiki pretty URLs

Using mod_rewrite to prettify MediaWiki URLs as described in the Dreamhost wiki breaks page titles with ? and & characters in the title. There are a number of posts from a MediaWiki developer floating around on the web that claim an alias will avoid this problem:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-June/005814.html

However, this doesn't work for me. I get a 500 Internal Server Error.

Alias /wiki /home/mysite/mysite.com/w/index.php

Any suggestions?

**edited because I seemed to have RTFP wrong. Sorry.**
Edited by pangea33 on 11/23/06 11:16 PM (server time).

I used this article and it worked for me:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL

I used it on scouthistory.net/wiki