-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 Vector. Vector was introduced in
+the 1.16 release (2010) and has been set as the default in MediaWiki since
+the 1.17 release (2011). This replaced the popular skin, Monobook which
+had been been the default since MediaWiki 1.3 (2004). Vector is now the
+default skin on Wikimedia Projects.
+
+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.
+
+The other skin that is widely used (and is the MediaWiki default before 1.17)
+is Monobook.
+
+* Monobook: Named after the black-and-white photo of a book, in the page background.
+This was introduced in the 2004 release of 1.3
+
+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 ==