InstaPedia wiki-encyclopedia uses images instead of articles, Instagram-style

StartupRealities No 110

InstaPedia is an online wiki-based encyclopedia which has an Instagram-type reliance on visual information to describe terms and concepts. The images, infographics, charts and simple drawings on InstaPedia are accompanied by brief captions. As in all wiki-projects, volunteers contribute the images, photos and captions to InstaPedia and volunteer editors oversee and improve the content.

AUTOMATED IMAGE CREATION
In addition to humans, InstaPedia also uses bots to enhance the images and design computer-generated infographics and charts. To circumvent copyright restrictions and increase the availability of images in more conceptual fields in which little concrete imagery exists, InstaPedia's AI algorithms use Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to create new images from scratch.

CEO QUOTE
"What Twitter is to Wikipedia, Instragram is to InstaPedia. Social media and online encyclopedias are not directly related but their conceptual models of conveying information have parallels. Twitter and Wikipedia rely primarily on text, although both also incorporate images to enhance the messages and articles. Instagram and InstaPedia rely primarily on images, though both use text captions to give the context and make the entries more easily searchable.

 Who said that knowledge has to be encoded primarily in text? We only started writing 5,000 years ago but our primitive ancestors have been drawing on cave walls for at least 40,000 years. With InstaPedia, we have now come full circle," mused company founder and CEO Inse Pedersen.

Instagram logo 2016.svg
Instagram logo
(image source: Wikipedia)

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