Dear All,
As part of my discussions with Indic language Wikipedians I spoke with few members of Bengali wiki community.They have shared their editing experiences, their vision about Bengali wiki projects, and other related topics. I have summarized the discussion in meta wiki. It is available here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_L...
As you know most of the current active editors of Bengali Wikipedia is from Bangladesh. Bengali wikipedia has close to 50 active editors as on 2011 Octoberhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-october-2011/ . Over the years I got opportunity to work closely with Bengali wikipedians for various programs (Newsletter, developing typing solution, and so on are some of them). I remember Tinu and I closely worked with Jayantha to conduct a wiki workshop in Kolkata.
There are a couple of very interesting features I noticed about Bengali community. First of all, even though it is a small community, it is very evident from the tone and content of the discussions that it is a very warm and welcoming community. The second aspect I noticed is that there are frequent community meet ups (though in fairness, there are many more happening in Bangladesh than in India) and there is a reasonably good response to these meet ups. Meet ups are a really useful way of community building because it helps people connect and collaborate. Common to all Indic languages, there is a strong gap of awareness about the existence of Bengali projects and the need is felt to get media & press coverage to promote this.
In the context of the Kolkata Book Fair, one very interesting point that I found about Tanvir is, he cam to know about Wikipedia at a similar book fair in Dhaka! I wish West Bengal wikipedians all the very best in the Book Fair so that we can introduce and invite newbies to the Bengali wikipedia. We need to figure out a practical way of improving the collaboration between Bengali wikipedians in Bangladesh and in India. I felt very sorry when Tanvir couldn't attend WikiConference due to some VISA issues.
Read the discussion at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_L...
Shiju