Comment Re:Its in the best interest of users (Score 3, Informative) 130
First of all, any well-architected clustered app spends more time waiting for I/O at the web tier than it uses CPU, so the 2% "penalty" is on an underutilized resource anyway. Second, terminating SSL at your load balancers is standard practice, be they Amazon ELB SSL termination, F5 BigIPs, or reverse proxies. Again, all otherwise I/O-bound implementations which can spare the CPU.
The fact that SSL obscures the requested URI from intermediaries seems in-line with the goals of Wikipedia for free information sharing -- with SSL operating properly, an intermediary may be able to tell that you were on Wikipedia, but not what you were looking at.
SSL/TLS and/or its successors everywhere is in everyone's interest if maintaining privacy from ubiquitous snooping is a concern.