Wikipedia: An Opportunity to Teach Marketing Students Worldwide—And a Call for More Crowdsourced Marketing Content on Wikipedia.com

Abstract

Strategic management students, specifically marketing management students in this study, have an overwhelming number of information sources in the information age. Recent research findings suggest that students are heavy users of Wikipedia and use the website to get clarification on terms and concepts or to jump-start a research process (even if the instructor specifically asks them to avoid or not to cite Wikipedia) (Cheng 2010). We use categorical distinction content analysis to compare a sample of 852 marketing textbook glossary definitions to the definitions found on the Wikipedia website yielding over 4,000 pages of data. Additionally, a second study of 172 terms outlines how coverage on Wikipedia changed over time and provides a preliminary assessment of the reference credibility. The data suggest that overall Wikipedia is comparatively accurate to textbook definitions, but an incomplete source of information for general and domain-specific marketing content.