Am I allowed to use Wikipedia content? [closed]

Question

I'm always confused when reading licenses ....

I want to implement (to be honest implementation is already done) a commercial iPad app which makes use of content from wikipedia. Am I allowed to

• Embed hardcoded links that point to wikipedia articles and display those in an in app browser?
• Implement an aggresive caching that mirrors part of wikipedia to make content available offline?
• manually download wikipedia articles during dev time and bundle the content within my app?

Answer 1

Wikipedia's content is licensed under Creative Commons, the one that allows commercial usage. Open Main page and scroll to the very bottom of it. See that small text:

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.

You should have checked that investing time implementing something.

Here is the license itself (slightly shortened by me, not original text):

You are free:

• to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
• to Remix—to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution
• Share Alike

Answer 2

The Wikipedia license is actually one of the easier to read, although it needs to be read in conjunction with the Terms of Use (which defines the Attribution conditions among others).

In short, you can share and alter the content as long as you attribute it correctly (typically by hyperlinking back to Wikipedia), and you use the same license for any alterations you make.