This is a continuation of a previous thread that was marked as solved. (See
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/InternetExplorer/thread/35ea2211-7e56-4a4e-b2a7-9ebe1cbede42)
For me and several others the solutions suggested in that thread did not help. I am still not able to access several of the Wikipedia pages that I have been able to access in the past. And about half the time, if I search for a wikipedia article, IE8 will not display the resulting pages that are found. I never had this trouble with IE 7 or earlier versions and find it very frustrating that a site as popular and useful as wikipedia exhibits this sort of compatibility issue with IE8.
The particular issue that occurred today was a with this link --
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=1h&oq=&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GPMD_enUS318US318&q=variance+algorithm. But other wikipedia references continue to fail for me and for others. This needs further attention from the experts at MS and Wikipedia.
However I have found a solution that works EVERY time. Use Firefox. Download it from
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ie.html if you do not already have it.