If you’re planning to enable rewrite for MediaWiki using nginx, make sure to follow instruction for lighttpd on the MediaWiki’s wiki instead of the one in nginx’s wiki. Of course you need to adjust the rewrite but its regex is pretty much the same. Better for your sanity.
do you have an example of what the nginx configs should look like?
–timball
# on server block
rewrite ^/wiki/([^?]*)(?:?(.*))? /w/index.php?title=$1&$2;
rewrite ^/wiki /w/index.php;