-This document describes the overall architecture of MediaWiki's HTML rendering
-code as well as some history about the skin system. It is placed here rather
-than in comments in the code itself to help reduce the code size.
+MediaWiki's default skin is called Monobook, after the black-and-white photo of
+a book, in the page background. This skin has been the default since MediaWiki
+1.3 (2004). It is used on Wikipedia, and is popular on other sites.
+
+There are three legacy skins which were introduced before MediaWiki 1.3:
+
+* Standard (a.k.a. Classic): The old default skin written by Lee Crocker
+during the phase 3 rewrite, in 2002.
+
+* Nostalgia: A skin which looks like Wikipedia did in its first year (2001).
+This skin is now used for the old Wikipedia snapshot at
+http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/
+
+* Cologne Blue: A nicer-looking alternative to Standard.
+
+
+And there are four Monobook-derived skins which have been introduced since 1.3:
+
+* MySkin: Monobook without the CSS. The idea is that you customise it using user
+or site CSS (see below)
+
+* Chick: A lightweight Monobook skin with no sidebar, the sidebar links are
+given at the bottom of the page instead, as in the unstyled MySkin.
+
+* Simple: A lightweight skin with a simple white-background sidebar and no
+top bar.
+
+* Modern: An attractive blue/grey theme with sidebar and top bar.
+
+
+== Custom CSS/JS ==