Babak and Persians 

Hey Tajik, thanks for the BBC article. I did want to talk to you though with regards to the stuff going with the Persians. I noticed some activity there and realized that someone has added Tajiks as 'Persians', which in effect negates the Tajiks page. Now the problem with this is the article on the Persians will turn into a massive article describing cultural variations and divergent histories etc. I'm not sure this is a good way to go. Tajiks are indeed Persians, but are as distinct as the Slovaks are from the Czechs or the Croats from Serbs (both groups speak mutually intelligible languages or basically the same language). In addition, as you well know, many, if not most, don't call themselves Persians anyway (most I've met refer to themselves as Afghans or will talk of their 'Aryan' lineage). The way we've set it up, on Iranian peoples was good in that we had Tajiks as a sub-type of Persians (which I believe you put in), and thus can have their own article as both a closely related type of Central Asian Persians and as an Iranian people with many distinct qualities of their own (linking them more to Persians in northeast Iran rather than those of western Iran), including the Tajiks of Tajikistan. In addition, most references distinguish between the two, while clarifying Tajiks as an Iranian people, usually referred to as Central Asian Persians. In short, after all this, I think it's a huge mistake to subsume the Tajiks given the weight of history and divergence that has taken place simply due to the vast geographic expanse and the Tajiks own unique qualities. Ciao.