A fact from Squirrels on college campuses appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the Did you know column on 11 July 2023 (
check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Higher education, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
higher education,
universities, and
colleges on Wikipedia. Please visit the project page to join the
discussion, and see the project's
article guideline for useful advice.Higher educationWikipedia:WikiProject Higher educationTemplate:WikiProject Higher educationHigher education articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mammals, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of mammal-related subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.MammalsWikipedia:WikiProject MammalsTemplate:WikiProject Mammalsmammal articles
The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as
this nomination's talk page,
the article's talk page or
Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
Comment: Was planning on nominating this earlier but was attending to other articles/projects on Wikipedia and then offline life came up yesterday, so I believe this is now an 8-day-old article as opposed to a week or less. But was hoping given the quirkiness of the topic,
WP:IAR can apply here?
Overall: This article is quite fun. I'm not thrilled about the U.S./Canada focus, but see that the issue was raised on the talk page and an effort was made to address it. The lead section could really benefit from a bit of expansion to better summarize the article. I don't find the ALT1 hook to be particularly interesting. ALT0 works, but a hook with something about colleges using their squirrel populations in admissions videos or college squirrels losing their fear of humans could also work here. Overall, this article is a joy. Well done.
gobonobo+c 04:07, 26 June 2023 (UTC)reply
Close paraphrase has been addressed.
gobonobo+c 12:29, 26 June 2023 (UTC)reply
Good grief!!
This article is crazy US dominated, as if Squirrels were not found on university campuses in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Not sure how I can improve it however from Australia. --
Bduke (
talk) 07:18, 4 June 2023 (UTC)reply
The sourcing I found presents it as a largely North American / U.S. phenomenon, and that includes scholarly journal articles. But if you're able to find any European or Australian-centric sources, that would be helpful of course.
Soulbust (
talk) 08:53, 6 June 2023 (UTC)reply
And as though it's specifically universities and colleges. What a bizarre article.
Secretlondon (
talk) 17:44, 11 July 2023 (UTC)reply
Is there a concern with the article here? Because yes it's specific, but that's because there is a lot of coverage and research on the phenomenon of squirrels populating college campuses in particular. This
wouldn't be the first article pertaining to specific squirrel behavior.
I am disappointed that the article fails to note the urban legend that Princeton University's campus squirrels—with an unusually large number of melanistic grey squirrels—are intended to reflect the university's colors of orange and black. The
cited Huffpost source gives two versions of this: a selective breeding experiment (officially denied
in the Weekly Bulletin in 1999) and importation of both orange and black squirrels, according to Huffpost attributed to
Moses Taylor Pyne. There are online sources that the orange squirrels have since died out, leaving the black squirrels as an unofficial mascot. (This saddens and puzzles me; when I was last on the Princeton campus there were plenty of slightly rufous squirrels. Cornell also had a lot of those on campus.) I would have expected this tradition to fall squarely within the article's remit.
Yngvadottir (
talk) 21:42, 11 July 2023 (UTC)reply
Sorry it wasn't there before, but
I'll see where I can work it into the article. When going through the sourcing, I found a lot of universities that had squirrel-related traditions, mascots, ongoings, etc. So I probably just glossed it over in the moment. Thanks for bringing this up, as well as providing that Weekly Bulletin reference.
Soulbust (
talk) 00:18, 13 July 2023 (UTC)reply
@
Yngvadottir: Sorry it took quite a while, but I have incorporated that information into the article. Thank you again for the suggestion. Best wishes,
Soulbust (
talk) 03:40, 15 June 2024 (UTC)reply