Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
My snap reaction is that you need one column, with a stack of two-column grafs floating in it: you want subjects to stay together in their start points.
I ended up introducing <debate>, <contended>, and <rebuttal> tags that allow an editor to control the appearance of the rebuttal column. A page without any rebuttals is just a normal full-width page. This would allow these tags to be used on other wikis -- wherever it is useful to allow sections of text to be prominently disputed.
I was trying to do away with the <debate> tag, allowing abutting <contended> sections to be automatically detected, but this required some hacking of the core parser to give the required context information.
The resulting extension is here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Debate
Thanks to everyone for getting me kick-started with PHP and MW development.
Mark