I (not OP) highlight text as I'm reading it. Sometimes paragraph at a time, sometimes with frantic mouse movements and clicking highlighting a few words or a sentence at a time.

I will admit it's very weird to watch, but it helps my ADHD concentrate.

I just leave the cursor wherever it happens to be. With link-dense pages, as Wikipedia tends to have, that very often causes a fairly large box to pop up.

Also, when scanning a page looking for info and links, I seem to both read and keep the mouse pointer somewhere close to the center of the window, increasing the risk of annoying pop-ups. (Moving the mouse too far away often causes the wrong thing to scroll whey you use the wheel, perhaps not on Wikipedia but on many other sites.)