I thought the distinction was: "white papers" are not necessarily peer-reviewed by an academic journal's editors; white papers tend to be internally-made documents within an organization, edited by that organization's members, for the purpose of knowledge/information.

Academic papers as a whole can include both "white papers" and "peer-reviewed journal articles" aka the "papers" that many think of. I would surely put a "white paper" onto my resume if I thought it was a great piece of work.

"Whitepaper", for a long time, meant sort of the opposite of "academic paper." They weren't published in refereed conferences and journals and were usually published by corporations or governments but they resembled academic work in their contributions.

Something like the original BTC paper is a good example. It wasn't published in a conference or journal, but the level of rigor and the scale of the contribution is similar to what would be published in a conference or journal.

I think the crypto community was the end of it. Now "we are launching $CoolCoin" gets called "whitepaper."