After a lot of frustration and consulting with the tech support at my IHP we discovered that the problem with my dokuwiki install at dogdimension.org was due to an incomplete upgrade. important files in lib/exe and lib/scripts had not been overwritten with the newer files of the same name. So one lesson learned is if you are getting unexpected errors make sure than all of the files uploaded in an upgrade actually write over the older flles of the same name.
The other thing I learned is that .htacess has as much to do with servers in general and php as it does with dokuwiki specificially. So to do a google on
.htaccess and php in order to learn more about .htaccess.
Here is a useful site about .htaccess and php
http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess.php called Corz.org.