Wikis for research on public display

I heard through the grapevine of a blogger’s announcement that she will be conducting her research through a wiki.

I’ve been wanting to do the same thing for a while, but having some hosting space gives me the flexibility of installing my own software. I was looking at some, Mediawiki which runs Wikipedia for instance, but I don’t know if there is something that I particularly want.

screenshotWhat I would like is something that allows me to write or take notes, but then also allows discussion right within the page, not as in Wikipedia where the discussion is held in a separate page. This would give me the ability to have people annotate what I was writing as I was writing it.

I think the best I will be able to do is just have a section at the bottom of each page where I want comments labeled “Comments”, and make it clear that is where I want people to write. It would be good as well to have a mechanism for there to be citation links to my work as well.

It would be a lot neater if I could have come kind of two columned thing, with the writing on one side and the comments on the other (like the layout of GAM3R 7H30RY). Any ideas?