# Whitepaper

A whitepaper is a kind of document little-used in academia but much more common in business and policy contexts. It is a semi-formal, persuasive document that outlines and analyzes a project or proposed course of action, generally intended for limited circulation among readers directly involved in the process at hand. There's some interesting [history of the medium and the term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper) in British efforts to contain early Jewish-Palestinian conflicts. Whitepapers might be considered to lie on a spectrum between internal memos and external reports. They are generally not formally published and thus, despite their alleged whiteness, may be considered [gray literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_literature).

## Features

  * A tone that is serious and impersonal, but clear and direct above all. It is more technical than journalistic writing, but less formal and jargon-laden than academic writing.
  * Articulates problems and solutions—ideally, one of each—with a persuasive and rigorous explanation of each.
  * Provides relevant background and research data to the problems and solutions at hand.

## Examples

  * [British White Paper of 1922](http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1922.asp) - the original, distinguished from Parliamentary Blue Papers, on the topic of the future of Palestine
  * "[On Distributed Communications](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf)" - a 1964 report by Paul Baran for the RAND Corporation, outlining the basic protocol for what would become the Internet
  * [The Bitcoin whitepaper](https://bitcoin.org/en/whitepaper) - the classic early articulation of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency system; since then, whitepapers have been frequently used to introduce new cryptocurrency projects
  * [New York Times Innovation Report](https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/) - a 2014 internal report at the _New York Times_ that advocated a radical turn toward digital media