Selena Deckelmann recognized among 2026 Time Executives of the Year: Tech and Data

If you were anywhere near the Portland open source community at the turn of the century, you had heard of Selena Deckelmann. Back then, she was an active participant and contributor to the PostgreSQL and Python communities. Then she got more into community organizing with things like Open Source Bridge. So we’ve known about her awesomeness for a long time. Now, Time is catching on to what we already knew.

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.

For more on Selena and others who received recognition, visit 2026 TIME Executives of the Year: Tech and Data.