Due to problems with vandalism, there's a proposal at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Semi-protection_policy to allow for semi-protection of pages: that is, have the possibility for pages subject to massive amounts of vandalism (such as [[George W. Bush]]) be protected from edits by anonymous users and the newest registered users, rather than fully protecting the page, which would lock up the entire page from being edited by anyone. This proposal already has a significant amount of support on the talk page, and is hopefully moving towards becoming policy. It's intended solely as a vandalism-reducing tool, and so will have the same usage patterns as protection due to vandalism has at present.
Please take a look at it and give us your thoughts.