Can I remove inline citations while copying Wikipedia texts?
<p>Many Wikipedia articles have inline citations <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey" rel="nofollow">like this one</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Honey gets its sweetness from the monosaccharides fructose and
  glucose, and has about the same relative sweetness as granulated
  sugar.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#cite_note-NHB_carbs-1" rel="nofollow">[1]</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#cite_note-Oregon_State_University-2" rel="nofollow">[2]</a> It has attractive chemical properties for baking and a
  distinctive flavor that leads some people to prefer it to sugar and
  other sweeteners.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#cite_note-NHB_carbs-1" rel="nofollow">[1]</a></p>
</blockquote>

<p>I am using articles from Wikipedia in my book and I have already provided credit to the authors by including URLs of the articles. Can I remove these numbers that refer to footnotes? They already exist in the Wikipedia pages and a reader can see the reference on the site itself if he wants. Wikipedia attribution policy (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content#Re-use_of_text_under_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike" rel="nofollow">Reusing Wikipedia content</a>) says that some external notations should generally be preserved by the re-user. "Should be" doesn't mean "must be", does it?  </p>

<p>If you follow the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/" rel="nofollow"><em>CC BY-SA 3.0</em></a> license under which Wikipedia articles are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License" rel="nofollow">licensed</a>:</p>

<p>You are allowed to make modifications, because Wikipedia doesn’t use a "no derivatives (ND)" CC license. </p>

<p>The license <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode" rel="nofollow">requires (in section 3. b.)</a> to denote that changes were made:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>[…] clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work</p>
</blockquote>

<p>So follow all the attribution requirements, make clear that your adaptation is licensed under <em>CC BY-SA 3.0</em>, and state something like "The original work has been modified.", or if you want to provide more details, something like "Footnote references from the original work have been removed."</p>

creative-commons attribution