Useful extensions for MediaWiki

I think you found your answer (upgrade MediaWiki :)). That is the best solution and the ImportUsers script has already been written to support the functionality you requested.

However admittedly there are always reasons, both good and bad, for keeping a version back.

In this case, you should be able to use perl or bash and curl to create a script to pass the variables via command line, for MediaWiki or any other website.

First have it sign in and store the login cookie:

curl -c ./cookie.txt -F wpName1=username -F password=yourpass "http://yoursite.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&action=submitlogin&type=login"

Then go to the sign in page and pass your signup variables:

curl -b ./cookie.txt -F wpName2=newusername -F wpPassword2=newpassword -F wpRetype=newpassword -F wpEmail=emailaddr "http://yoursite.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&action=submitlogin&type=signuptitle=Special:UserLogin&type=signup"

Please note I do not use MediaWiki and have not tested this solution, but in theory this should work from the variables and post pages I have observed on other MediaWiki installs. It will login and save the cookie, then read the cookie to authenticate and post the data to create a new user. You could also output the resulting code to ensure that the 'post' actually created the new user. Roll those curl functions into a script to cycle through an delimited file and you have yourself a user import script.

I know this isn't a full solution but should get you on your way to creating something that will work for you in a pinch.

That's a very interesting expression they have there. Their main manual page for short URLs has this to say:

These guides are old and are almost entirely bad advice.

Anyway, let's see if we can simplify it a bit.

rewrite ^/wiki/([^\?]*) /mywiki/index.php?title=$1&$args last;

Note that you can't overlay the 'pretty' path (which you've put in the location block, so let's run with it) and the physical path; the norm is to use /wiki/ as the pretty path (your $wgArticlePath config) and /w/ as the physical path (your $wgScriptPath config).

So, all in all, something like this:

location / {
  rewrite ^/$ /wiki/ permanent;
}

location /wiki/ {
  rewrite ^/wiki/([^\?]*) /mywiki/index.php?title=$1&$args last;
}

...and you'll need the PHP handling in some form as they've shown in their example, as well as to update your Settings.php with appropriate $wgScriptPath and $wgArticlePath settings, as well as setting $wgUsePathInfo to true.