Anthere:
This is only true if there is no social norm forbidding a sysop to edit a protected page. At least, on the english and french wikipedia, I do think the rule of no-edit on a protected page exist. Maybe not on all projects ? Can you from your data gather such an information ? I mean, are there situations when a long-protected article actually grow and evolve during the protection ?
I can't automatically check it with the current script, though I could theoretically check for each article how many revisions there have been after the protected one. On the German Wikipedia, the general pattern seems to be that the article simply "dies" after the protection, with the exception of a few minor edits by sysops, like these:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=B%C3%BCrgerrechtsbewegung_Solidari... http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Verlag_Heinz_Heise&diff=676005... http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=P%C3%A4dophilie&diff=6769462&a... http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erich_Honecker&diff=7926076&am... http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vertreibung&diff=9105694&o... http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Egon_Krenz&diff=6801089&ol...
These are often requested on the talk page, and sysops seem to stay away from controversial edits to protected pages. In that way, I don't think the German Wikipedia is fundamentally different from any other, it's just that the number of pages where sysops have to act as gatekeepers for long periods of time is[*] far larger. Speculating, I think this must give a different impression of the role and importance of sysops to newcomers.
[*] For the record, admins Bdk and APPER have now unprotected many of the affected pages on the German Wikipedia. I'll re-run the script in a week and report the results here.
Erik