The non-ssl version loads much faster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl

I'm curious as to why wikimedia is even offering all their content over ssl in the first place.

This might be useful in a country where the government censors certain topics.

The government would still know (if they were logging traffic) that you accessed the page. In this case, as it is publicly accessible, the encryption is fairly meaningless.

The HTTP request is also encrypted, so figuring out what page you accessed on a site with millions of pages isn't quite as easy as you make it sound...

Yeah, why would anyone ever want to access information over an encrypted channel?

I actually had an argument with my statistics professor about this...

The question she gave was basically this: 'The king has one sibling, what is the probability that it is a boy?'

I actually took an opposing view to her initially and then came back the next day saying that it is ambiguous and depends on what we assume about the king, but she wouldn't even agree with me on that.

A similiar "paradox" is the infamous Monty Hall Problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_Problem