Wikipedia and OSM are generally seen as major human achievements because they bring a huge amount of generally reliable data to the whole world on a libre basis

Wikipedia and OSM are generally seen as major human achievements because they bring a huge amount of generally reliable data to the whole world on a libre basis, and you call them vanity projects? For them to be vanity, one's work would have to actually be deeply associated with one's identity so that one could look good in the eyes of others. In fact, 99.9% of people using that data will not know or care who originally contributed it, and editing these resources is about as thankless a task as can be.