It used to be possible for all users to see the protection settings by using action=protect. This is broken in recent versions. When I try just looking at the settings, only a message saying I can't change settings is diplayed.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
The page was recently patched to prevent this action. This appears to bring the page in line with the delete and move interfaces.
Besides, can't you just look in the page history for the history item which shows the protection event? Or even the protection log?
Since when was hiding the protection settings from regular users expected behaviour, and why is this so?
I don't recall this being discussed anywhere, it seems terribly untransparent, and there are plenty of ways of finding this out.
I would treat this as a regression, not a bug fix.
(In reply to comment #7)
Fixed in r50420
I'm still unsure whether this was the appropriate course of action. I've filed bug 38536 just now ("Add page protection status to MediaWiki's info action"), which is a proper solution to the OP's bug request. Additional comments about this bug are here: bug 18677 comment 8.