Selena Deckelmann Is one of TIME's 2026 Executives of the Year: Tech and Data - Time Magazine

Wikipedia has long been the product of humans—but now, Selena Deckelmann is navigating a world in which AI is reshaping how the platform’s content is created and consumed. As chief product and technology officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts and operates Wikipedia, Deckelmann has worked to shore up defenses against AI crawlers that can overwhelm its infrastructure. By spring 2026, Wikimedia systems were blocking or throttling roughly 30% of automated crawler requests totaling billions of hits per day, according to the foundation. (The organization hasn’t completely shut out AI and tech companies, however; there is also Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial API product with a limited free tier that allows large-scale data access.)

Deckelmann is also changing the editing experience for volunteers in an effort to confront growing quantities of AI slop, including a new system that advises contributors on their sourcing—whether text is copied wholesale from an LLM—and cautions against overly promotional language. In a 2026 trial, new editors offered the “Revise Tone” structured task instead of the standard “Copyedit” task completed 38.7% more tasks without reducing edit quality, according to the organization.

In the age of AI, Deckelmann also aims to keep growing Wikipedia’s volunteer-based model. “It shouldn’t ever be up to just a very small group of people to decide our future,” she says.