The Aim
The aim is simple: to build up a database of startups.The real aim is to build a resource to help people research startups - find ones in the same field as them, see what sort of funding successful startups got and so forth.
That requires pages being updated with new information. I have no idea if that will work out or not.
The Project
Startup Wiki was borne as a replacement for HNStartups. HNS was a great idea but it is currently full of spam and looks unlikely to be rescued. As I was throwing together a replacement it occured to me there were a couple of "killer" features that could be added to make it even cooler. And so the site grew and grew and grew and....Rather than tie closely to YCombinator I designed Startup Wiki to let you list all of the founders and investors by name. The is all then cross linked in the database so you can check out a specific founders, VC's or seed funds (etc.) and have a neat list of all their startups!
The domain name is .co.uk because everything else is taken :) If that confuses matters then it could easily be changed in the future.
There are community moderation features insipired by Stackoverflow: we'll see how well they work out. Hopefully it will help with combating the spam.
The code is, I fully admit, a complete mess; that's because it was thrown together in fits and starts. It will improve with time.
Engineering
Startup Wiki is built in PHP using the Kohana Framework as it's base.The back end database is MySQL and everything is hosted on a shared cluster with Servage.net in the EU.
I used ReCaptcha for the anti-spam captchas. Woopra, Clicky and Google Analytics are used for stats tracking.
Ticketing and SCM is on BitBucket.
Design
The best site on the web for colour schemes has to be colourlovers.com, our scheme (below) is available here