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Subject:"white papers" From:Paula Foster <foster -dot- 242 -at- OSU -dot- EDU> Date:Tue, 3 Jun 1997 16:06:56 -0400
Hello all... (Breaking out of lurk mode for a moment)
My take on what a "white paper" might be is related to the use of colored
paper to designate revisions of a document. The movie and television
industry, for example, uses a standard sequence of colors to help people
keep track of the constantly mutating script. Each time the screenwriters
make a change, which on some productions happens several times a day, the
changes are "published" (copied and distributed to the people working on the
film) on a new color of paper. Everybody in the entire film business knows
that the color sequence is white, yellow, blue, green, pink, etc. (Something
like nine colors go by before you get to white again). Once you know the
color sequence, you need never be confused about which version of this or
that scene is the current version. Your script eventually looks like a
multicolored mess, but it isn't really a mess because you know that every
page is current.
I am not suggesting that the same is true of all industries that write and
revise documents, but I do know that the film business isn't the only place
where color is used to indicate temporal order. For example, my research
partner was telling me just the other day that a certain 1995 government
publication called the "White Paper" (which makes recommendations to
Congress about intellectual property law) was at one time called "The Green
Paper," before it was finalized.
So maybe the expression "white paper" got started as a temporal order thing,
but got fixed at some point, in some industries, to designate a particular
genre of document?
I dunno. FWIW!
Back to lurking,
Paula Foster
Ohio State University
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