If it's Wikipedia, is it plagiarism?

 I haven't been very sympathetic to people who have lifted bits of others' work, but this time the "stealing" came from Wikipedia. The one who took the 200-word selection (on the sex life of flies, no less) is best-selling French novelist Michel Houllebecq, for his newest novel, "La Carete et le Territoire." 

He says his whole style is based on taking banal and technical descriptions and making them part of an artistic composition and rejects the notion that this qualifies as plagiarism. 

It seems to me that the fact that Wikipedia is composed anonymously by many people make it a special case. Here is part of what the Wikimedia Foundation says:

"The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts and illustrations. It is therefore pointless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images, even if rules at your company or school or organization mandate that you ask web site operators before copying their content...Permission to reproduce and modify text on Wikipedia has already been granted to anyone anywhere by the authors of individual articles as long as such reproduction and modification complies with licensing terms..."

"To re-distribute text on Wikipedia in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) This applies to text developed by the Wikipedia community. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which should be indicated on an article's face or on its talk page. For example, a page may have a banner or other notation indicating that some or all of its content was originally published somewhere else. Where such notations are visible in the page itself, they should generally be preserved by re-users."

If I'm reading this correctly, if you lift passages, you should at least have a page somewhere (acknowledgements or bibliography, for instance) that reveals where you got them. 

(Confused about how to protect what you write? For some tips and information on my Protecting Your Material report, go here: http://timetowrite.com/protecting-your-material/