Understanding comes both ways. Since Snowden's whistleblowing, the tech community has already been denounced by a significant proportion of society as selfish nerds who value their own privacy over (communal / national) security and order. Our switch to https-only (as opposed to https-recommended) is only sealing that impression.
Coincidentally with the switch to https-only, China has blocked the Chinese Wikipedia.
We always need to balance security and accessibility. I feel that it is unwise to remove even the option to use Wikimedia without https encryption. With the systemic bias of Wikipedia, I feel that this switch has cost us more in loss of breadth of readership than we gain in security.
"Not our fault" is not good enough when an encyclopedia loses a small but significant proportion of its readership, not out of the readers' voluntary choice.
Deryck
P.S. Nemo: FYI the case in my mind is in the UK, not HK or Mainland China.