Wiki As Commercial Promotion Tool

As seen on Wiki!

Would you ever believe we may see this expression on a product on store shelves?

We do not want our WikiWikiWeb (at least Ward's!) to become a CommercialPromotionTool?.

Some debate exists over the best way to deal with promoters and those who seek to establish new, unrelated communities on WardsWiki:

Ignore them. Let them coexist.
Delete their content.
Delete their content. Send them email explaining why. Maybe even suggest some alternatives (a certain free-except-for-the-advertising commercially driven wiki hosting service, or creating their own wiki using one of the engines downloadable from the list at WikiWikiClone)
Include links to said commercial service and WikiWikiClone on a "high-visibility" page, and hope to preempt them from creating content here in the first place.
Edit and refactor their content.
Allow hyperlinks only on the wikizens HomePage linking to the wiki-related commercial product or Web Site.
Contact the author and find out why s/he is spamming the Wiki. Collaborate with the author on appropriate refactoring of content.
Stop whining. Commerce is a fact of life, kids. It's what pays the bills and keeps this little playground running. If you don't like ads, get the fuck off other people's property. By "this little playground," do you mean the Internet in general, or WardsWiki in particular? If it's the latter, I don't see Ward posting his own ads to support this site, so if you're posting your own ads here, you really ought to be paying Ward for the privilege. After all, this isn't your property.
Other ideas?

The first choice will fracture the community and cause valuable contributors to leave (gee, how zenophobic do I sound?). The second seems awfully harsh. The third requires a lot of work. The fourth looks like an endorsement for one particular commercial enterprise, which of course defeats the whole purpose of this exercise.

For those wishing to establish their own community, the third or fourth option may be preferable. The best way to handle this in the general case would be a good question for RichardDrakeInterviewsWardCunningham.

I say let Ward decide, it's his. However, if it were mine I would delete any such page as soon as I saw it - with no explanation. If I deleted something incorrectly, someone could let me know and I'd think about it and if I agreed would restore it. I would use this zero tolerance approach to create a hostile environment for promotional postings. Not because I think promotion is bad, but just to restrict topics to software development and those things loosely connected to software development.

The Wiki is not exactly Ward's; it's a community. He has given up a certain amount of control to us, the WikiZens. The WikiNature tends towards community solutions rather than appealing to Ward to fix things. We are the Wiki, in a sense. -- BrentNewhall

Just for the record I don't just prefer option 3, I carried it out the other day, emailing Ward as follows:

Dear Ward

From WikiWikiWeb:

An advertisement and link to to a UK-based website (really sorry that it was a co.uk) was added to the top of this page and a number of other less important Wiki pages around 9.30-10.00 am London time 30th June 2000. The IP address given on RecentChanges was 193.115.72.8. -- RichardDrake

It was about 15-20 pages I guess, I assume by hand therefore. I took them out, sometimes not replacing the "Category Empty" that was probably originally on most of the pages.

This was very straightforward spam so I also edited RecentChanges so that even my deletes didn't get noticed. -- RichardDrake

I see nothing wrong with allowing people to list products in appropriate topics. It is when they get obnoxious and spread it all over that it becomes a problem.