User talk:FlamingMingo

Welcome to Wikipedia

A map animation that shows the difference between the rhumb line and the great circle from Miami to Stockholm by warping the projection, showing that the great circle (shortest path) is curved towards the North Pole. The great circle is highlighted in red.

Hi FlamingMingo. I reverted your addition of this animated map image to Great circle and Rhumb line. I don't want to discourage you from contributing, but I think this image has some serious problems. First, the text and lines are so small that they are effectively illegible. I think it tries to show too much of the world as context, with the result that you can't make sense of the part it is trying to demonstrate. Second, the animation is really choppy and distracting, which makes it also frankly pretty confusing. It's not really obvious why it jumps back and forth between different map projections. Usually animation should be used pretty sparingly and conservatively on Wikipedia articles; there are places where an animation can be helpful, but they always take some amount of attention away from the text someone might be trying to read. Moreover, on Rhumb line there is already a static image which shows effectively the same concept as this, while on Great circle there's currently no discussion of rhumb lines, which may confuse readers and makes the article less self-contained. As a separate aside: I think "curved towards the North Pole" is a somewhat misleading phrasing. There is no curving here: the great circle arc is straight. It is more accurate to say that the Mercator projection does not show arcs of great circles as straight. –jacobolus (t) 01:02, 4 May 2026 (UTC)