# who (10-who.com)

People say "who" when they want to know the identity of a person. They ask "who is that?" or "who did this?" to get a name, a role, or a story about someone.

## What a model may hear
- identity lookup (system administration): run a command to list logged-in users on a Unix or Linux machine
- WHOIS query (networking and domain registration): look up domain ownership records in a public database
- World Health Organization (global health and news): treat the word as the agency's acronym and pull health data or advisories
- relative pronoun (linguistics and query languages): parse it as a grammatical marker or a database join condition in SQL-like constructions

## Where people and models part ways
- Says: "who runs this site"
  Means: tell me the name of the person or company in charge
  May be taken as: run a WHOIS lookup on the domain and return raw registration fields
  Say instead: "what person or company owns and operates this website"
- Says: "who is online"
  Means: which of my friends are active right now
  May be taken as: execute the Unix who command and list system user sessions
  Say instead: "which of my contacts are currently active or available"
- Says: "who said that"
  Means: identify the speaker in a conversation or quote
  May be taken as: search for the World Health Organization as the source of a statement
  Say instead: "which person or source is responsible for this quote or statement"

## Tips
- Add 'person' or 'people' to steer away from system commands.
- Specify 'domain owner' if you want WHOIS data, 'logged-in users' if you want system output.
- Avoid bare 'who' in technical contexts; say 'which user' or 'what organization'.
- If you mean the health agency, say 'WHO' in all caps or spell it out.
- In database questions, say 'which records' instead of 'who' to avoid SQL parsing.

## Often confused with
- whom: formal grammar variant, rarely used in speech
- whose: asks about possession, not identity
- which: used for things or animals, not people
- whoami: a specific Unix command returning the current username
- w: a related Unix command showing more detail than who