Misuse of real-world term: Human Resources

Guess The Trope time! "Human resources" is a pretty common term related to manpower and management. Predictably, this has a number of tropes, such as in Dilbert. I found it rather surprising that our article on the topic is called Inhuman Resources, and that the term Human Resources doesn't redirect there, but is instead an article on something completely unrelated.

Thankfully it already has a serviceable redirect, i.e. Made Of People. I would suggest that Human Resources be swapped with its redirect, and that the term HR is then redirected to our actual article on HR. Thoughts please?

Human Resources found in: 344 articles, excluding discussions.

This title has brought 243 people to the wiki from non-search engine links since 20th FEB '09.

Is there any misuse at all? I haven't seen any, and this is a bit too entrenched to swap just because its a real-world term for something else.

I checked about a dozen (not statistically significant, I know) and found two that were using it in a slightly broader sense (humans as an exploited natural resource). All the rest were correct. None were using it in the management sense.

Example of overbroad use (from Playing with Syringes):

• Fullmetal Alchemist has hidden governmental labs in which mad scientists do horrible things to people through alchemy, including taking convicts, ripping the souls out of their body and turning them into sapient armor, taking wounded soldiers and making them into human-animal hybrids, and more generally, just turning people into Human Resources.

That's actually borderline. And from Lady Land:

• In the H-Game Meet and Fuck: Star Mission, the Human male has been nearly driven to extinction by "a succession of wars". Men are state property and Human Resources, used solely for breeding. Their rarity has lead to their classification as a protected life-form.

That's a little broad.

I think the title is very witty, clear enough, and doesn't seem to be getting serious misuse, so I'm inclined to leave it.

Sampling method: I scrolled around the related-to page and poked at links at random.

edited 10th Aug '11 6:37:19 PM by Xtifr

Considering that the so-called HR departments are portrayed in media (and in society in general, at least where I live) as organizations precisely dedicated to extract resources from people to feed an "enterprise" (and with enar-Matrixesque methods at that!), I think the title marvelously fits the clear, concise, witty tuple, in a manner that covers the problem of "preexisting term" too.

If it's true that there's no substantial misuse, I don't see a reson to change it. We can direct people to UsefulNotes.Human Resources or to The Other Wiki in the page.

The meaning of this trope might not be immediately obvious, but it's clever and makes sense in context. See also I Am a Humanitarian.

For me, titles don't start getting truly bad until they reach the point of not meaning anything after you read the article.

Right, and that isn't the case here. Human Resources isn't actually "misuse" of a common term: it's just an alternate meaning that you can easily get by searching both words in a dictionary.

Moreover, when I hear Made Of People I immediately think of Soylent Green, and therefore cannibalism (a subtrope of Human Resources). That might just be me, though.

I figured it out just by looking at it, but that's only because I am a fan of punny stuff.

I like the name. Its not at all misue of the real world term, for reasons listed above. And if there's no missue then there's no problem.

In the interest of clearing out TRS, may I suggest a lock?