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With his crisp black suit and grey-flecked beard, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could be mistaken for billionaire technology tycoon Larry "the Oracle" Ellison.
While the two look alike, Ellison and Wales couldn't be further apart when it comes to their approach to business, a division that could be described as self-interest versus mutual interest.
Ellison made his fortune driving a hard bargain and buying out his competitors, while Wales has built a global community of volunteers who contribute time and brain power to write and police Wikipedia's millions of entries. There's not much money in that, despite Wikipedia's massive global influence.
But Wales has a more ambitious goal in sight, one that will start to be realised tomorrow when he launches the Wikipedia search engine, Wikia Search. Some see it as the opening salvo in a battle to wrest control of the search engine market from dominant player Google.
In a pre-recorded interview with John Campbell recently, Wales outlined the relatively brief history of the successful online encyclopaedia.
"Six years ago, I was just some guy at home typing on the internet like everybody else," said Wales. "I consider myself more of a carpenter than an architect."
Wales wants his network of volunteers to help decide how search engine results should be ranked, rather than just using computer algorithms to do the process automatically.
In doing so, said Wales, people - rather than a handful of search companies - armed with their own black-box technologies would determine what should be given priority.
The theme here is transparency, but Wales also hopes Wikia Search, which will launch with 50-100 million indexed pages, just a fraction of Google's index, will make money.
Wales is the chairman of Wikia Inc, the very much for profit organisation he has set up to run Wikia Search.
How will he make money? Presumably the same way Google does - by charging advertisers for premium spots at the top and along the right side of search results.
But how do Wikia's commercial aims reconcile with its philosophy of transparency and community-mindedness?
Presumably Wikia's user base, in conjunction with some clever indexing technology, will determine what should be ranked highest in search engines, and therefore the types of adverts that will be thrown up first in searches.
It will no doubt be as difficult to keep on the straight and narrow as Wikipedia has been.
Having humans make editorial decisions on search-engine rankings isn't new but, when done on the scale Wales imagines, could make results more topical and relevant to the interests of web users. But it could also be open to manipulation.
Will it be any better than punching a search term into Google? The internet search king, with its billions of indexed web pages, will be difficult to dethrone.
Wikia, however, could be a useful resource for more targeted information-based searches and Wales' aims are modest - he wants 3-5 per cent of the global search market, a share needed to make Wikia viable.
What's still to emerge is whether Wikia will share advertising revenue with editors who contribute to improving search engine results.
And it's interesting that, just as Wikia launches, Google is making its own attack on Wikipedia with its own user-generated encyclopaedia, Google Knol.
Adding greater community input into online search results will be a major theme this year.
One New Zealand company, Christchurch-based Eurekster, is already a leader in this area with its Swicki technology for adapting search results on websites to the needs of users.
It's yet to be seen how commercial aims will be balanced with the transparency and mutual interest of these community-based search projects.
But they are generally seen as useful tools in empowering internet users to better dictate what they want the internet to deliver.
