There are several means by which the Members of this Project have created the alternate or pseudo history of Ill Bethisad. A project as long-running and with so many contributers (anymore both active and inactive) can't be managed in a haphazard way. Nor can it really be run by a single person who is at the center of the creative activity. Indeed, in the first years, this was exactly how the project operated: the original deviser of the alternate history was at the center of a cadre of interested individuals.
As the scope of the project broadened, more and more autonomy was ceded to individual participants. Even so, it became clear that some kind of framework would be necessary, lest the internal history suffer from the same inconsistencies that other similar projects suffer (the Star Trek universe being an excellent example, well noted and well complained about by serious fans). To the end of creating some level of consistency and also in order to protect the hard work done by all Members -- even those that no longer participate in the Project -- several Basic Principles eveolved to either address or avoid problems.
"There are five great philosophical pillars that support the Ill Bethisad project and help maintain it as a reasonably cohesive unit." In short, we find that history in IB has been created by and is guided by these principles or philosophies:
QSS
Ytterbion's Rules
the Cycle of Proposals
the IB Wiki
Fiats and other mandates
Add to these a couple of other related articles:
Terminology
The role of the Gatekeepers might also be addressed in this article, though their actions really only affect the project externally rather than the corpus of the alternate history.