I'm fine with people editing Wikipedia and contributing to OSM as much as they'd like, but I think each activity is more focused on the 'contributor' than the audience, and I'd rather not subsidize it. I believe that Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and many other crowdsourcing projects have succeeded precisely because they harness vanity, for laudable objectives. That said, most of the 'contributors' are contributing precious little.

Work-for-pay tends to be more beneficial to others than 'creative expression'-type activities such as writing, painting, or composing music. The vast majority of what people create is worthless to others, whereas much of what people do 'for work' is actually useful to others.

What makes you think that remunerative work is inherently valuable to anyone other than the person paying for that work? You, like I do, probably work largely in order to line the pockets of some already rich CEO. That doesn't mean what either of us does for a living is socially valuable. This seems more like vanity to me than editing Wikipedia or improving OSM.

I can’t speak to your work, but the reason I get paid is the same reason that my employer profits, and that is because the company provides consumer surplus to its customers.

I’ve occasionally edited Wikipedia, to correct grammatical or factual errors, but I don’t see it as having contributed much to the world.

Consumer surplus is not the only human good and infact discounts good done for humans who do not have money.

This not liking vanity thing is interesting but if you tie it to economics then anything that helps people that doesn't make money --things like free software and participating in charities-- could be considered 'vanity' too despite the good they can do.

I got similarly worked up over 'virtue signaling' and people only doing good things for personal prestige when I was an angsty teen but later realised it was better to believe that some people want to do good things sometimes because reasons.

To be clear, I’m fine with people doing whatever they want; I just don’t want to encourage it when it’s selfish behavior. I am not telling you what to do, and if you’d like to pay Wikipedia editors, I won’t stop you.