Talk:Squirrels on college campuses

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:

Did you know... that research conducted in 2020 found that squirrels are "nearly ubiquitous" on college campuses in the United States and Canada?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2023/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Squirrels on college campuses.

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Did you know nomination[edit]

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.

The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron (talk) 07:27, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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Comment or view
Article history

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... that research conducted in 2020 about squirrels found they are "nearly ubiquitous" on college campuses in the United States and Canada? Source: Peplinski, Joy; Brown, Joel S (August 31, 2020). "Distribution and diversity of squirrels on university and college campuses of the United States and Canada". Journal of Mammalogy. 101 (4). Oxford University Press (published March 27, 2020): 930–940. doi:10.1093/jmammal/gyaa033. Retrieved May 27, 2023.
- ALT1: ~~... that squirrels on college campuses will eat trash or even boldly steal food from humans?~~ Source: Rimbach, Rebecca; Butler, Gabrielle; Gupte, Pratik R.; Jäger, Jörg; Parker, Claire; Pontzer, Herman (2023). "Gray squirrels consume anthropogenic food waste most often during winter". Mammalian Biology. 103 (1) (published November 4, 2022): 69–81. doi:10.1007/s42991-022-00326-3. PMC 9638426. PMID 36373055. and https://mndaily.com/268832/arts-entertainment/the-extraordinary-life-of-the-campus-squirrel/
- Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Kawa model Soulbust (talk) 06:38, 4 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
- 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?

~~Will be doing QPQ shortly.~~ QPQ now done. Soulbust (talk) 06:38, 4 June 2023 (UTC) Created by Soulbust (talk). Self-nominated at 06:23, 4 June 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Squirrels on college campuses; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.[reply]

General eligibility:
New enough: - At 8 days this is late, but supplementary guideline D9 (newness IAR) can apply here, so Y
Long enough:
Other problems:

Policy compliance:

Adequate sourcing:
Neutral:
Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing: - The "each tree, building, sidewalk, and other structure" sentence needs to be reworded, but otherwise this passes Earwig.
Other problems:

Hook eligibility:

Cited:
Interesting:
Other problems:

QPQ: Done.

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!![edit]

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.

There is also a whole category with articles about how animals find themselves in a particular setting or environment. Eastern grey squirrels in Europe is one, Rats in New York City is another. Soulbust (talk) 00:23, 13 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Princeton[edit]

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]