I am not a lawyer, but I do have six years experience of Wikipedia, was once a very prolific Wikipedian, and, despite my lack of activity there in more recent years, am apparently still an “admin” on the English language Wikipedia. This, coupled with working for an open-access publisher, means that I have also picked up a little knowledge of (mostly US & UK) copyright over the years. Since I can’t boil all that down to just 250 characters (or whatever the limit is), this post serves to answer this question, raised at FriendFeed: ‘Does an article in pubmed belong to the “legal public domain”, can I copy and paste it in wikipedia?’
