"Who is one to believe" or "which one to believe"

Do you think this edit was necessary?

So, who is one to believe? (as in "So, who am i to believe?")

into

So, which one to believe?

Specially considering that the following question in the original text was also specified in a similar manner:

And how is one to back that decision up?

Reference

Solution 1:

No, the edit wasn't necessary.

As other answers indicate, people can justify changing "who is one to believe?" into "which one to believe?", but I don't think the change is even a significant improvement, let alone a necessity.

Personally, I find "Which one to believe?" rather "clipped" and informal - it looks like a section heading in a magazine article, which doesn't sit well with the relatively formal style of the rest of the text.

The argument that OP is asking which reference source to believe, which therefore can't be "personified" using "who", seems trivial, bordering on pedantic. In any case it would have been a lesser edit to simply change the original "who" to "which". Deleting the word "is" makes an unwarranted change to the tone of the writing.

To summarise, I don't think the edit should have been made. It's irrelevant that some people prefer the revised version - the original certainly wasn't seriously defective, and in such matters I think common courtesy dictates that one should not make trivial changes to another's phrasing.

That last paragraph would be more appropriate if the question had been asked on meta, since it's about how the site should operate - but it's hard to separate "site protocol" from "strict grammar" on this particular issue, since the grammatical error (if indeed there is one) is so trivial.

Solution 2:

The post that was edited refers to a number of dictionaries, and asks which ones to believe.

Dictionaries are not people. Some books are the voice of a single person -- but dictionaries are usually not.

"Who" refers to people.

"Which" refers to things. A dictionary is a thing.

Hence:

• "Of these dictionaries, who am I to believe?" is wrong.
• "Of these dictionaries, which am I to believe?" is right.

Solution 3:

So, who is one to believe? makes it clear that the question is about people. So, which one to believe? could also be about people, but it could also be about a story or an account or a report. It is also written in an elliptical form. If the question is clearly about people the only reason for changing the first for the second would be to match, in some way or another, the style of the rest of the text. (And can we agree now not to pursue here the who / whom point?)

Solution 4:

Already good answer from Barrie, but let me emphasize another possible reason for the edit

Who is one to believe? / Who am I to believe?

is easier to be taken ambiguously and harder to parse. This is a little bit more obvious in a sentence such as

Who am I to inherit?

which can mean - 1) who will I inherit and also 2) to express a wonder in a sense of "why should I inherit?". I think this parsing ambiguity carries over and that ultimately the

So, which one to believe?

is more clear. While at it you can take out "one" unless you have reasons to keep it, as

So, which to believe?

is even shorter and also understandable.