I have a website devoted to investing and I want a section of the site that defines many investing terms and things like that. What I want to do is use many of the definitions from Wikipedia and perhaps edit/modify the entries to save myself time.
Now my question is this would be completely legal correct? Wikipedia allows users to take the text (even though I plan on doing light modification to it) in its entirety because it is a user created encyclopedia? I just want to make sure I am not breaking any copyright law before I start doing this.

Anyone that can shed light on this?

Wikipedia I believe is under the creative commons license if any. The basic context of that agreements is to site your sources and not claim said content as completely your own work.

Wikipedia also cannot copyright definitions. That would be like copyrighting the word "as" and every time you used that word you owed money

I'm not a lawyer but I think that's what you'll need to get a meaningful answer. Or (and I know getting a response is a long shot), you could try contacting the moderators over @ Wiki and see if you get a response.

My mother-in-law is a judge and I brought up a similar topic with her. I had a client that wanted to use pictures from his suppliers' website on his own site. She recommended getting permission via e-mail and keeping the e-mail on file. I apply the same "rule of thumb" on all similar situations now.

Anyhoo, why not simply paraphrase the content completely? I'm pretty sure if you paraphrase you'll be in the clear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...tation_License

read the first two paragraphs, you can use it, without contacting them, you will only annoy them contacting them.

Originally Posted by gaz545

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...tation_License

read the first two paragraphs, you can use it, without contacting them, you will only annoy them contacting them.

While the above is 100% accurate, I would still reprase it a bit. Make it unique with just a little work.