Very little, they already have https support - I am sure that they could handle disabling http . that is not the point.

I see the point Jimmy Wales was making - it's the old: 'if you have nothing to hide' - and it should stand.

If you want to keep something private you have the right to do that....I don't care what I do in public....

Unfortunately Wikipedia chose to go with a separate cluster for SSL. If they ran SSL on their normal front end then it would already scale up to this: The public key crypto is free on hyperthreaded cpus because it can run currently with memory accesses for other requests, and modern CPUs have harware accel for the symmetric crypto that make it ~free.