Redirect pages of pagination section with GET-variable?

Question

Apache HTTP Server

There are addresses like:

site.ru/articles/news?page=N

where N is the page in the section, i.e. any number from 1 to infinity!
these addresses need to be redirected to an address of the form:

site.ru/news/page/N

I try like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} page=(\d+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^articles/news /news/page/%1 [R=301,L]

The redirect works, for example: it
http://site.ru/articles/news?page=2
redirects to:
http://site.ru/news/page/2?page=2
but I need the final request to be without GET variables, i.e.:
http://site.ru/news/page/2
How to do this?

Answer 1

solution found:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} page=(\d+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^articles/news /news/page/%1? [R=301,L]

I forgot the question mark (?) at the end, though I don’t know why it’s there and what it means!

Answer 2

The question mark is needed, it removes the bucket at the end.
1 robots.txt - disable all queries with page=
2. real canonical to the main page
3. redirect actually ;) if from an old site
4. close page with ajax.