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| - | # 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. | ||
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| - | ## Examples | ||
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| - | * [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 | ||
| - | * [British White Paper of 1922](http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1922.asp) - the original | ||