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_Languages/Bengali/Discussions/2011

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 October. 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.