Talk:Gram-negative bacteria

Definition

Right now the introducing definition is "Gram-negative bacteria are those bacteria that do not retain crystal violet dye in the Gram staining protocol.[1]", [1] refering to an article that states nothing about the definition. This sound like a strange definition and if this really is the true definition, it should be clearly stated why they are coloured in contrast to gram-positive bacteria. Does anyone have a reliable source on what definition we should go for? 83.233.145.84 (talk) 20:53, 22 September 2010 (UTC) This is covered at http://www.horizonpress.com/gateway/gram-negative-bacteria.html as follows: In microbiology, the visualization of bacteria at the microscopic level is facilitated by the use of stains, which react with components present in some cells but not others. This technique is used to classify bacteria as either Gram-positive or Gram-negative depending on their colour following a specific staining procedure originally developed by Hans Christian Gram. Gram-positive bacteria appear dark blue or violet due to the crystal violet stain following the Gram stain procedure; Gram-negative bacteria, which cannot retain the crystal violet stain, appear red or pink due to the counterstain (usually safranin). The reason bacteria are either Gram-positive or Gram-negative is due to the structure of their cell envelope. (The cell envelope is defined as the cell membrane and cell wall plus an outer membrane, if one is present.) Gram-positive bacteria, for example, retain the crystal violet due to the amount of peptidoglycan in the cell wall. It can be said therefore that the Gram-stain procedure separates bacteria into two broad categories based on structural differences in the cell envelope. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.157.20.189 (talk) 15:27, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Too jargon-y

The introduction is too jargon-y and needs to have more of an eye on its audience. Why do most people come to the Gram-negative bacteria page? I can't say for sure, but I'd bet they're looking for information about the relationship between this bit of information and real-world application, most notably in the context of antibiotics.

The details are important, but they're meaningless without context. As in, "how does this fit outside of the academic systemization of everything?" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.33.60.211 (talk) 14:59, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

• Agree. From yesterday's Telegraph: "The report pointed out that since 2000 only five new classes of antibiotic had been discovered and most were ineffective against one of the biggest threats, “gram negative” bacteria." This shows this issue is important, but our intro doesn't even hint at it. Someone who understands better than me should outline why this is all important in the real world. Thanks :) Malick78 (talk) 15:51, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Standardized spelling & punctuation

Standard form used by the US Federal Government's Center for Disease Control is as follows: [1]

gram

Gram should be capitalized and never hyphenated when used as Gram stain; gram negative and gram positive should be lowercase and only hyphenated when used as a unit modifier.

• Gram staining
• gram negative
• gram-positive bacteria

It would be helpful for this article, Gram-positive bacteria, and Gram staining to be standardized accordingly. Wikiuser100 (talk) 15:02, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I lowercased gram-negative and gram-positive in their articles. Lowercasing is the style used by various medical dictionaries (e.g., Dorland's, M-W Medical, Taber's), AMA style, and others. As for whether the hyphen is treated as invariable across attributive and predicative positions, major styles such as AMA style treat them as permanent compounds, not temporary compounds, and thus hyphenate in both positions, because they are entered as headwords in medical dictionaries. The style in which the compound is styled openly in predicative position is treating the compound as a temporary compound, which is fine, but sometimes it comes simply from a resident editor who knows the general norm about temporary compounds (hyphenated attributive, open predicative) but is unaware of how the treatment of permanent compounds cascades over that. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:28, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

As a long and belated aside: While I don't disagree with the attributive/predicative and permanent/temporary analysis that Quercus solaris presented above in 2014, that appears to be original research, and more importantly is not a distinction MoS and WP formally draw in writing, because 99.9% of our editors are never, ever going to understand, remember, and apply it. We have learned the hard way that very fine grammatical and linguistic hair-splitting causes more problems than it solves on Wikipedia. See, e.g. MOS:DASH, MOS:HYPHEN, and years and years of confusion about where and why to use one particular horizontal line vs. another; even after simplification and clarification, it's still very difficult for some people. Another, despite many rounds of clarification, is when to capitalize job, role, noble, honorary, and other titles (MOS:JOBTITLES). Another example is as simple as many editors not being able to wrap their heads around the fact that (aside from particles in phrasal verbs), some short prepositions, e.g. like and as, can also serve as adverbs in superficially similar constructions, and various words not usually thought of as prepositions can sometimes act as them: a (often as a-), less, next, past, save, etc.. This resulted in years of flame-wars about titles of published works (especially pop-culture ones) and the five-letter rule, until in the end it was better for the project to just enact a rule that such a "rare preposition" (but not everyday prepositions like as, from, with, of, etc.) may be given in upper case in a title if it is so capitalized in the vast majority of sources about that particular work. This is not GrammarRulebookThumpingPedia any more than it is MedicalJournalGeekoutPedia.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:12, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

As noted at corresponding thread at Talk:Gram-positive bacteria: Mix-and-matching these styles is not permissible on Wikipedia, per MOS:ARTCON. Wikipedia capitalizes eponyms and other proper names, and has no special "do not capitalize if adjectival" rule; we don't care if CDC does have one. Source usage is inconsistent, so follow WP's style manual when writing at WP.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:07, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish and Quercus solaris: I agree with SMcCandlish (talk · contribs). I find that capitalizing eponyms, is a way to acknowledge someone's contribution to science. kupirijo (talk) 11:05, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

More to the Wikipedia point is that it's confusing to the reader to keep veering back and forth between two spellings in the same article, often the same sentence. Worse, lower-casing the name Gram will confuse a very large number of readers (including pretty well-educated ones) that this has something to do with gram weight/mass measurements. Nor does WP veer jarringly from one style to another when switching topics. Using "gram-negative" (or worse yet, "gram negative") is a form of WP:JARGON, though not even consistent from one sub-sub-field or journal publisher to the next, and is not encyclopedic writing for a broad audience.

Stylebooks of the US Centers for Disease Control, the American Medical Association, and other off-site organizations are irrelevant; WP uses its own style manual, formed by consensus (and informed by all those off-site style guides, in the aggregate). The goals are maximum reader comprehension, cross-site consistency, and minimum editorial strife; never maximum agreement with some particular external concern (much less nationalistically going for American onea in parituclar). [Aside: The CDC one even directly contradicts itself on hyphenation of compounds.] If someone is convinced Gram should be lower-cased in all instances, or lower-cased when adjectival, and/or never hyphenated in a compound, or only sometimes hyphenated in a compound, despite us already having decade-stable and clear rules at MOS:CAPS and MOS:HYPHEN, then they can make a case for rule change at WT:MOS (which does codify various exceptions, based on strongly consistent usage in sources, and a clear benefit to the reader).

I'd kind of back-burnered this particular "issue". I changed some of this from gram to Gram during a basic copyediting WP:GNOME run earlier this year (having forgotten the 2017 thread above completely), and got reverted, and had then meant to RfC this but got distracted by other things. The matter should be discussed in a high-profile RfC. Objections to these particular specialized-style fallacies have been raised many times over a long period, at many pages, without any resolution. And even the WP:MED regulars are not presenting an internally consistent take on what the answers should be, nor compatible rationales for them. "This wikiproject vs. all other editors" disputes are corrosive, but this is looking more and more like "How I write for the journals I personally submit to, or else."
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:07, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Thank you for your message. So what is an RfC? I see further down on this page you mention it. kupirijo (talk) 16:25, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish:, you started an RfC on this topic in 2017 and there was no consensus to support your proposal (though the RfC was generally not well attended). To your point above, I'm sure readers get confused by much of our microbiology coverage since it often jumps wildly between levels of detail and is poorly maintained by the too-few of us who edit the site and are interested in the topic. I very much doubt that capitalization of "Gram" is significantly contributing to their confusion. As you're more than aware the community has neither committed to total grammatical/stylistic consistency or total variety, but peddles in shades of grey. For this particular minutia, some folks prefer a capital letter, some a lowercase. The community hasn't established a consensus that we should enforce one of those preferences. You seem to have a preference (uppercase), which is fine. But swinging by this article every few years just to change the capitalization to your preference, and waiting to see if Quercus, Iztwoz, and I have died or moved on yet, seems unhelpful at best. Ajpolino (talk) 16:58, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Kind of the whole point here is that this ultimately has nothing to do with "preferences" (mine or yours or AMAs or whatever). We have site-wide guidelines on matters like this. We have inconsistent use in RS, which means: follow the guidelines. We have specialist editors arguing for a variance from the guidelines, but usage analysis says the "rules" they advocate are in the minority, which means: follow the guidelines. Even if that weren't the case, the specialists are arguing for different variant approaches (CDC's, AMA's, etc.) that are mutually incompatible and which have differing rationales (which don't relate to encyclopedic writing anyway); this means there's not even consensus among that editorial subset on what variance to seek, ergo: follow the guidelines. We don't actually need a new RfC on this, but we should do one anyway just to put this matter to bed forever, since it's been re-re-re-argued without a clear WP:CLOSE since at least 2004, which is ridiculous and counterproductive.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:55, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps I am indeed misunderstanding the situation then. I was under the impression we lacked a site-wide guideline on this, you proposed one a few years ago, and it has not yet been taken up by the community. Instead we have inconsistent use in reliable sources and inconsistent use on Wikipedia. You seem to see that inconsistent use as a problem that requires a solution. I do not see it as a problem, just a matter of editors' preferences; an Engvar-type thing minus (as far as I know) the nationality. Ajpolino (talk) 18:34, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Yes, we already have guidelines on handling of eponyms and other proper names, and on hyphenation. (No one's going to write an MoS rule about this specific Gram- case, unless there is no other way, though. We avoid WP:MOSBLOAT, like extremely topical line-items that just repeat what the general guidelines say. MoS is over-long already. See also WP:AJR: don't add some nit-pick rule to get around the system-gaming of one or a few editors, just ensure the existing rules are interpreted and followed as intended, revising for clarity if needed.)

The problem is that a few editors at this page and related ones want the guidelines to not apply to "their" topic, whether for personal reasons, because they like AMA's version better, because they'd rather follow CDC style, or whatever. This is a WP:CONLEVEL policy failure. People have been objecting to this special pleading since 2004, but it somehow never gets resolved, probably just due to the comparative obscurity of the topic. An RfC several years ago to resolve it was not attended by enough editors to come to a conclusion. The extant guidelines really are enough already, but every time anyone tries to apply them to this "magically different" article, someone starts reverting. So, there needs to be another RfC, that people actually go to and which gets a formal close by an uninvolved admin, or this "slow edit-war" could go on for another decade and a half.

Anyway, there is no such thing as "an ENGVAR-type thing". There is ENGVAR, which was created for a very, very specific reason, and it does not expand or analogize to other matters. Nothing is "like" ENGVAR, even the three other things ending in -VAR. They exist for different but equally extremely specific reasons, all of which basically sunk to the level of "the community is tearing itself apart across thousands of articles about this, so we need a rule that stops editwarring and incivility about this specific thing". They're not even faintly like this little SSF quibble. MoS exists in large part for site-wide consistency, and we neither make up, on-the-fly, a new style regime on a per-article basis, nor write whole categories full of articles in the style of off-site publications that pertain to that topic area (science like a science journal, pop-culture topics like Rolling Stone magazine, etc.). Otherwise we simply would not have a style manual at all; everything would just be up to random editorial discretion at each article. But it's not, and it has not been since WP's very early days. There are lots of style questions, unaddressed by MoS, that no one really cares about (not enough to make a guideline about it, or fight about it for 16 years as has happened here), because they're arbitrary and don't make a substantive difference (for us; maybe they matter for those who write and refer to The Chicago Manual of Style and other super-giant-ass style guides that are an order of magnitude more nit-picky than ours).

This [Gram|gram][-| ] thing is not one of those doesn't-matter issues, since "gram negative" introduces at least three forms of confusion for the reader simultaneously, for no gain whatsoever other than making what appears to be a total of three or four medical editors happy (one of whom is retired/banned anyway, though most of us do wish Jytdog would/could come back, I think).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:21, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Kupirijo: See WP:RFC. The one in 2017 attracted comments from nearly no one, and archived without resolution, so the issue is still open (obviously, since there's been renewed discussion, reverting, etc.). An RfC on an obscure matter like this generally has to be "advertised" across various pages. When it comes to guidelines and their interpretation, I tend to list pointers to those discussions at WP:VPPOL as well, if they will affect more than one or two articles. That will usually draw in enough commenters to establish a consensus (though hosting the RfC directly in VPPOL isn't usually a good plan unless it's something that would affect thousands of articles; lots and lots of people watchlist that venue, and they get tired of style trivia being aired out there, which is really what WT:MOS is for). That said, starting an RfC within a couple of days of American Thanksgiving, when a lot of editors are traveling (whether they should be or not during a pandemic), is maybe a poor idea. Better to put it off a bit.

What to ask and how may need to rethought, since the last RfC didn't do anything. There appear to be at least two (probably several other) conflicting ways of handling this in the medical literature (AMA and CDC do not have the same "rules", and are just two American proponents of style guidelines for professional medical writing [which isn't encyclopedia writing ...]. There are many others, and MoS would primarily defer to the cross-field Scientific Style and Format anyway, if there were actually a need to write differently about this than about other things. SS&F is where we got most of our more geeky rules, like the MOS:NUM stuff on units of measure, as well as MOS:LIFE on scientific names of organisms, etc.). If one med. style turns out to be overwhelmingly common across all med. lit. (not just American) there might be a better argument to use it on WP.

But what's in evidence right now is that med. sources are very inconsistent on this, and general-audience sources (what WP mostly follows) aren't going along with this capitalize-then-don't-then-capitalize-again stuff, nor med. specialists' dislike of hyphens. For cases like this, it's very instructive to do careful Google Ngrams searches of book content (constrained to works from the last few decades; we don't care how it was done in the Roaring '20s). We find (when sculpting searches to avoid "Title-Case Headings, Captions, and Titles Like This") that "Gram-negative" and "Gram-positive" beat out the lower-case versions [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]. When we do case-insensitive searches, only intended to track differences in hyphenation, we find that the hyphenated forms of the compound lead over the unhyphenated ones, both in direct adjectival use [8] [9], and in predicative use [10] [11]. So, there is a provable trend toward and dominance of "Gram-negative", over all three of "gram-negative", "Gram negative", and "gram negative" (ditto for the "positive" versions), although usage has been quite inconsistent, with a shift away from gram to Gram happening gradually 1995–2010, and no meaningful shift toward or away from hyphenation (it has always dominated).

When usage is inconsistent, or consistently against a variance, there is no grounds for a variance from MoS's defaults. But these are arguments better made in an RfC, since arguing about it at this one article will probably have no effect on others (and there are other considerations. E.g., the "rules" that CDC, AMA, etc. have about this are based on their treatment of compounds and eponymous terms generally; it's not specific to this one. Yet on WP, the only item of medical terminology I know of with an endless (albeit slow-moving) "style fight" about it has been this one. That's, well, weird.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:56, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish, Ajpolino, and Quercus solaris: Hi. I am a biologist and I must admit I have never seen Gram-negative being spelled with a small case g in the scientific literature, although some recent articles do use it. A search in pubmed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) might be useful, although I do not know how to do a case-sensitive search. I am however sure that in microbiology class in grad school we were taught the capital-case version (like Petri dish for example). Also as a scientist, I find the small-case "gram" a bit inconsistent with other scientific disciplines, like in physics, where units named after people have to be capitalized. It would weird to write "1000 pa" (Pascal), "200 t" (Tesla), "2 v" (Volt) and "1 a" (Ampere), but we do write "1 g" (gram). kupirijo (talk) 23:01, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Actually, I found many old articles with small-case gram. I must admit it is confusing, but I must say I prefer the upper-case Gram from the point of view of consistency with other scientific terms. kupirijo (talk) 23:13, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, as I said in my post above with the Ngrams info, it was inconsistent (and still is to an extent), but has been leaning more and more toward capital-G Gram, regardless of construction, since the mid-1990s. Just what's already on this page indicates that the lower-case g stuff is particular to some specific organizations, rather than being any kind of standard.

When I go to Google Scholar and search for "gram-negative bacteria" [12] and "gram-positive bacteria" [13] (with the quotation marks), the results (which are case-insensitive, and not date-constrained) are a big mix of g and G spellings (with maybe even a lead for g). However, when this is constrained to "Since 2016" (there's a left-menu shortcut for that), all of a sudden the results are overwhelmingly G. [14][15]. Using "Custom range...", and setting it to 2000– (a few years after the approximate beginning of the big shift shown in Google Ngram books results), these journals results show the same pattern: G has already begun to dominate since at least that early [16][17] With all of these these, examine at least 2 or 3 pages of results (I'm not sure what GScholar does in the way of search-results placement tweaking on the first page, so get a good-sized sample). Same pattern if you do a 1995 search; it's just not quite as strongly G over g; the further back you look, the more g there is, up to a point.

Also, this search engine ignores punctuation, including hyphens (if you repeat these searches with "gram negative bacteria" and "gram positive bacteria", you get the same results as the hyphenated search terms), and the results are overwhelmingly hyphenated, almost the the point of unanimity. (That includes when used predicatively, e.g. "are Gram-negative" [18][19].) The conclusion I draw from this data and the Ngrams results is that the CDC and AMA stylesheets have been cherry-picked by someone[s], maybe unintentionally, just by confirmation bias, as supporting what they're familiar with from their work and learning in the 1980s or earlier. There's no aggregate evidence this g style has significant surviving real-world applicability even in specialized journals, much less across general-audience books, and there is clear proof that both the hyphenation and the capitalization dominate in reliable sources. The most that can be said for the g style and the no-hyphen style (and their combination) is that they were fairly common for a while in the 20th century.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:21, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

How much time and energy is being spent on this issue? To what end? So that upper case be used regardless of past discussion and an unresloved or rather unsupported rfc in 2017 ? It is a style choice - cannot be otherwise since it is used as such in many sources. Perhaps a talk page template stating the choice of style used might help.? To say the use of lower case has been sporadic or dated is an utter nonsense. I give the examples of lower case usage in present 2020 use: - websites: MSD Manuals; CDC; NIH; The Lancet "Gram-negative rods and surgical wound infections"; American Society of Microbiology; - books: Ferri's Clinical Advisor 2019; Robbins Pathology 2018; Harrisons Principles of Internal Medicine, to name a few. Can it just be left as a style choice especially since many of the editors and readers will themselves be familiar with lower case in their readings of medical texts and visits to well-known and trusted websites. --Iztwoz (talk) 10:53, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

@Iztwoz: It matters, again, because the lower-casing and hyphen-dropping usages (which are not actually consistent between the sources you mentioned, but matter of house style) are confusing to readers for multiple and obvious reasons; and these practices are not actually the typical usage in RS – not in the general-audience book market (which WP cares about more) nor even in specialist publications in the fields closest to this terminology (which I would gather you care more about). No one has suggested that zero sources use these styles, so the ability to cherry pick a few that do is irrelevant. We know for a fact from actual usage stats that everyone involved in these fields is already aware of and comprehending of multiple ways to write these terms, and in the aggregate they do not use either the lower-case or hyphen-free versions unless submitting to publishers that require them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:19, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Wikipedia is written for the general reader: to say that upper case is used in the scientific literature does not support this aim since the general reader is not inclined to look up Pubmed papers. Instead what will be looked at are reputable websites such as NIH, CDC, Encyclopedia Britannica, the popular Khan academy, Uptodate - who ALL use lower case hyphenated terms. Major medical textbooks – Ferri's 2019, Robbins 2018, Harrisons 2012, and Microbiology classic Brock Biology of Microrganisms 2019 all use lower case hyphenated terms - consistently and throughout. Also all these sources use upper case for Gram stain.--Iztwoz (talk) 10:59, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

... well, inspired by this conversation I assume, SMcCandlish has added a section to the site's manual of style supporting his preferred style. He started a thread here with some explanation. That's probably a better place than here to have the discussion. Ajpolino (talk) 19:51, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Um, no. I summarized MOS:DOCTCAPS - which focuses almost exclusively on eponyms and their capitalization – at the main MoS page, with a broader set of examples (beyond doctrines, law, schools of thought, etc.) because we actually apply the same principles site-wide regardless of topic. I then added a footnote on exceptions, specifically having in mind that something from the debate here might become such an exception (though I doubt it), and we had already extant exceptions to catalogue anyway (e.g. from MOS:ANGLO-, and one I think I pulled from MOS:MED or a discussion related to it (parkinsonian). The purpose of the main MoS page is to summarize its subpages and distill the entire thing to a key points, and we had failed to do that with eponyms, somehow. A better diff is this multi-edit one with covers later tweaks: [20].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:05, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps you wouldn't mind copying this reply to Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#MOS:EPONYM? I think that's a better place to discuss whether your addition to MOS summarized existing guidance, or extended guidance beyond its intended scope. I'll leave a short response here that I feel you did the latter. DOCTCAPS was about a narrow topic; you extended it to a broad topic. In particular, here you argued that if "Gram-negative" is used by most sources, then our MOS demands we adopt that as our in-house style. I didn't see that in existing guidance, but you added it in the footnote to your "summary". That said, if folks at WT:MOS agree with you that existing guidance supports your addition, I'm happy to say that I'm mistaken and pipe down about it. Ajpolino (talk) 20:41, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

spelling instructions

hey Quercus solaris On the face of it, it appears that this edit where you added "The adjectives gram-positive and gram-negative are conventionally lowercase in medical editing (as explained at Eponym > Capitalized versus lowercase.", is directed to people who might want to edit our article and change the capitalization. Is that true? If so, that makes sense, but they should be "invisible comments" as described here. If they are meant as part of the content, to inform readers about gram-negative bacteria themselves, then a) it needs to be somewhere in the body (nothing belongs in the lead that is not in the body, as per WP:LEAD) but b) I am not sure this is important enough to include in the article at all, much less in lead. Please clarify what the purpose of this is. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 11:25, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi. It's meant to serve as part of readers' education generally. The person in mind is the science student who is learning about this topic and has a natural question about the way the word is written (why isn't it capitalized like eponyms usually are?). In that sense it's about education, not "mere how-to". Although I agree that it "doesn't matter" in the sense that it's irrelevant to the biology, it's relevant in that it answers a question that an observant student may well ask. I agree that it doesn't need to be in the lede. Someone who wants that answer can bother to look for it within the article body. I will move it down. Quercus solaris (talk) 14:44, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

that may be OK, but you need a reliable source about how "gram negative" and "gram positive" are spelled in the real world. What wikipedia's guidelines are, is germane only to wikipedia editing. If you cannot supply a reliable source, we will need to delete this content. Jytdog (talk) 15:35, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

btw, your pointing readers to Wikipedia's editing guideline is why I thought this might be a note for editors, as opposed to general content.Jytdog (talk) 15:39, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

The link is not to Wikipedia's editing guidelines (which would be WP:MOS and its various sections). It is to the article on eponyms, in the section where it talks about how dictionaries style eponymous terms. Medical dictionaries (Dorland's, M-W Medical, Taber's, and others) style these adjectives lowercase (as they also do with parkinsonian, haversian, fallopian, and eustachian). I added citations. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:10, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

I am with you now, thanks. I made the link to the eponyms article into a Wikilink, as the "see X" is still making me quesy with regard to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid. I hope you find the tweak acceptable. Thanks, I do think this is helpful, especially as an "Orthographic note" I love that header! You probably noticed that somebody else commented on the gram positive Talk page, approvingly. So thanks for this. Jytdog (talk) 00:22, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, looks great—your efforts helped produce a better final result. Quercus solaris (talk) 02:47, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Dead Link

Hey guys! I noticed that the external link here: Gram staining procedure and images was dead so I removed it. I'm not sure what it used to link to, but I just wanted to put a notice here in case someone more familiar with it wanted to put up a replacement. Ajpolino (talk) 02:55, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

This article's lead is confusing

Each of the lead's two paragraphs seems to be equally divided between overall introductory discussion of the class of bacteria (a good thing) and discussion of the staining process (a bad thing here). I accept that explaining what makes a bacterium gram-negative requires some mention of the staining method, but as it's currently written, the lead is way out of balance. It should be focused much more on the class of bacteria itself, and if details about alcohol washes and adding counterstains and correct timing are required in this article, then their proper place is further into the article's body.

I'd fix this myself, but I don't know enough about the subject to do it competently. Somebody please improve this situation?—PaulTanenbaum (talk) 14:32, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Monoderm prokaryotes are indicated to be ancestral?

"Of these two structurally distinct groups of prokaryotic organisms, monoderm prokaryotes are indicated to be ancestral." This statement has 4 references, but all are from the same author. It is a bit biased. Modern phylogenic trees place the monoderm bacterial phyla between the diderm ones. See, for example, Terrabacteria. --Franciscosp2 (talk) 12:56, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

Capitalization RfC

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

The capitalization matter, which people have apparently been editwarring about since 2004, is being addressed at an RfC (also "advertised" at WP:VPPOL):

• Wikipedia talk:Manual of style#RfC: Inconsistent capitalization of eponym in same context

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:00, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Case change

I have changed back to previous long-term usage of lower case. The edit summary given was for consistency all that was needed was for one instance of difference to be changed. SMcCandlish why change a style usage just because it's not to your liking? The lower case on this page has been in use for over seven years - would think a discussion would be warranted before a blanket change? It's not as if this issue hasn't been addressed before. What is your particular problem with accepting a very well used alternative styling?--Iztwoz (talk) 11:33, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

I've done the same at Gram-positive bacteria. SMcCandlish I recall from a previous discussion that the uppercase is your personal preference, but I don't think there was any consensus for mandating the uppercase across the encyclopedia. Ajpolino (talk) 14:17, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Same at Gram stain. Ajpolino (talk) 14:22, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Gram negative cocci vs coccobacilli

Haemophilus influenzae is described as a gram negative cocci in this article. In the literature it is stypically described as a Gram negative coccobacilli and occasionally a GNR. The source that is cited even describes it as a coccobacillus. Can Haemophilus influenzae be removed from that section? kelubact (talk) 14:22, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Redid para kelubact --Iztwoz (talk) 09:38, 6 April 2024 (UTC)- thanks.