The question of how dense & organized a 'clump' must be to be called a galaxy is not the crucial thing. It's like debating whether Pluto should be called a 'planet' or not. There seems to be two possible directions a clump might take as stars begin to form, as described in the link, but no experts seem to think that stars just developed in some lonely isolation, then 'got together'.
What is important to understanding the universe is how they formed and what particles were involved and where all the matter that seems to to be mathematically required, but is not evident, might "be".


And Henrietta, "I think the stars formed galaxies. As soon as you have two stars, they exert a gravitational pull on one another..."... it just don't work that way. That's the kind of 'rational guessing' that people did before we had all the data of the last 20-30 years. Particles have a small, but significant 'gravity', and they needed to coalesce into large clumpy areas BEFORE they formed the smaller clumps that became stars.