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  • Just about semantics, there seem to be little differences between: white paper, position paper, stand point, analysis, opinion piece, leaflet, essay, article, view, text, couple of written words. Or at least there is lots of overlap between all these. Or is there a specific formal structure that a white paper must follow? Commented Aug 10, 2022 at 21:42
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    @Trilarion: As the term is used, a white paper is meant to be an academic version of an opinion piece: something that might appear in a professional journal, but doesn't rise to the level of a research article. That makes it somewhat stronger than (say) a typical newspaper or broadcast op/ed. I haven't read the WP in question, so I don't know if it rises to that standard, but... at any rate, I don't think there needs to be a formal structure so much as an engagement with formal reasoning. WPs are meant to convince thinking people, not create emotional identification or reactivity. Commented Aug 10, 2022 at 22:19
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    @Trilarion The author is also a good way to distinguish the various concepts you wrote. A white paper is only written by governments and possibly corporations, no newspaper will publish their own white paper. If something is written by a government they will also usually say which of these concepts it belongs to and they imply different levels of seriousness and formality. An essay is intended to be more vague and less binding than a white paper. Commented Aug 11, 2022 at 7:32
  • @quarague Just to completely understand: I couldn't write a white paper on Taiwan then? Whatever I would write would be some kind of commentary or analysis but a white paper would need to come from an organization at the very least and would have a kind of official binding character. Commented Aug 11, 2022 at 13:06
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    @Trilarion There are no official rules that anybody could enforce so you can call your writing whatever you want. But if you write something about Taiwan in a journalistic or academic setting nobody would call that a 'white paper'. Commented Aug 11, 2022 at 13:17