It is always heartening to discover that one was not wrong ... might be old news for some but I am logging this just in case it helps others.
VANK - Voluntary Agency Network of Korea, government funded Cyber Vigilantes ... presumably the committee wrestled for a long time over not calling the Wikipedian Agency Network of Korea. 16,000 members paying a membership fee of W30,000 each ... W1.28 billion government funding (down to W890 million this last year). They claim 7,000 foreign members at 200 new foreign members a month.
QUOTE
Korea’s government funded Cyber Vigilantes
Webmasters, beware. If you have a map of Northeast Asia on your site and the body of water located between Japan and the Korean Peninsula is labeled “Sea of Japan,†you may soon find your e-mail inbox full of messages seeking to “correct†your geography.
Groups of loosely organized South Korean netizens regularly fire off thousands of e-mails in an effort to promote their country’s national image and rectify what they consider to be grave mistakes about Korean history, geography, and culture. Depending upon how you view them, these folks are either self-styled “cyber fact-checkers†or hyper-nationalistic spammers ... ts members scour Web sites for “errors†about Korea, then barrage violators with protest e-mails. For instance, VANK wages a continual campaign to change the name of the Sea of Japan to the East Sea.
Korea’s government encourages this cyber-vigilantism. The Korean Information Service (KOIS), the government’s public affairs branch, sponsors contests to hunt down foreign Web sites that have “incorrect†content about South Korea ... One popular cause is to have the Liancourt Rocks, a group of uninhabitable craggy islets claimed as sovereign Korean territory ..
.Webmasters, beware. If you have a map of Northeast Asia on your site and the body of water located between Japan and the Korean Peninsula is labeled “Sea of Japan,†you may soon find your e-mail inbox full of messages seeking to “correct†your geography.
Groups of loosely organized South Korean netizens regularly fire off thousands of e-mails in an effort to promote their country’s national image and rectify what they consider to be grave mistakes about Korean history, geography, and culture. Depending upon how you view them, these folks are either self-styled “cyber fact-checkers†or hyper-nationalistic spammers ... ts members scour Web sites for “errors†about Korea, then barrage violators with protest e-mails. For instance, VANK wages a continual campaign to change the name of the Sea of Japan to the East Sea.
Korea’s government encourages this cyber-vigilantism. The Korean Information Service (KOIS), the government’s public affairs branch, sponsors contests to hunt down foreign Web sites that have “incorrect†content about South Korea ... One popular cause is to have the Liancourt Rocks, a group of uninhabitable craggy islets claimed as sovereign Korean territory ..
Sounds familiar?
VANK claims to have persuaded "some 300 different sources of information, such as encyclopedias and websites" to carry both the “Sea of Japan†and “East Seaâ€. This year, it turned its attention on one-on-one ties with members of MySpace to publicize Dokdo and Korea.
About.com caved in not because it agreed with the South Korean geography activists but because the e-mail bombardment was annoying ... at one point they received as many as 20 e-mails per day regarding this issue from VANK.
And, as it says on the Pee-dia page, "VANK members are not work for Money".
