Hello, I am currently developing a game that has many real object in it, and in the description of these objects I would like to show a little "educational" excerpt of text in order to add some "flavor text" to the objects in the game. I usually just take a few sentences or a paragraph of text from a Wikipedia page and put it into the game.

Is there a specific way I need to cite the text? After doing a bit of reading it looked like I could just reference the article like using "Parenthetical Reference" like so:

Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the Earth's crust. ("Sandstone," Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia )

Later I wish to start doing my own research on the subjects, but for now I just want to get a quick bit of information into the game.

This this type of reference acceptable for citing text in wikipedia? Do I need to provide more information? Do I have to search for publish dates, or Authors each time I want to do this and add them in?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia ;)

Ah thanks, I knew of that page but I was unsure of how much information was legally needed, but then I was the "cite this page" link on the side of the article. And that was the answer I was looking for, sorry, I guess I wasn't looking hard enough :)

Hmm, a very interesting point. Yea I was planning to have educational descriptions in my game just as interesting "flavor text" so players could actually "learn" something if they wanted to. I may have to do my own independent research to the point where I am not citing any specific texts for this to work. My plan was just to throw some quick information in about objects in the game for a quick read. I guess this may prove to be a much more delicate matter than I originally believed. My reason for this was so I could focus on game development instead of doing exhaustive research for a non-critical portion of my game.

I may have to abandon this whole idea for now.

On the other hand, if you for example hover the mouse over a sandstone wall in your game, and a tooltip pops up saying "This wall is made of sandstone. Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the Earth's crust." then it could be argued that this is not a citation, but the substantial part of that text has been copied verbatim from Wikipedia. Which would make it a derived work (or a plagiate if you don't attribute either).

I have absolutely no problem putting the citations into the game for the excerpts of the text that I use if that was the issue.

But I suppose I will play it safe, and just do my own research as you suggested if even posting citations after the text still may cause an issue. It is a little extra work but I can do that. I greatly appreciate all your responses, there was a bit more to doing this than I originally thought!

Just one more question just to be safe:

In the worst case scenario that for some reason I got called out for violating some copyright in my game by posting text from another website. Could I just immediately remove the text in question to avoid any other legal issues? Or is there a "It's too late, I caught you" clause?