I wanted to provide a follow back on the banner issue.

Joseph Seddon has been incredibly helpful on this. Whilst he confirmed he indeed drop the banner visibility to its minimum on purpose (sigh), he took time to propose and implement a new banner proposition and a AB testing system to test banner efficiency.

Lot's of appreciation for his help on this. I apologized to him for what was over-reacting. It was the disappointment from discovering what was wrong after several days wondering.

Florence

For those with loads of curiousity

Results for the AB testing may be seen here : https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=commons.wikimedia.org&platform=desktop&agent=user&start=2016-12-21&end=2016-12-21&pages=Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2016/Participate-c/en|Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2016/Participate-d/en|Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2016/Participate-c/fr|Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2016/Participate-d/fr

With the new banner, Desktop see's a 100-150% improvement in traffic.

Mobile is a mixed result. With an slight 5% improvement in English but a 2-5% decline in french.

The new banner :

EN : https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:What_links_here/mr&banner=WLA_NewBanner&uselang=en&force=1
FR : https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:What_links_here/mr&banner=WLA_NewBanner&uselang=fr&force=1

The meta page : https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail&notice=WLAfrica+2016