Robert West wrote:


Anyone who has recently browsed the web is likely to have come across
"Wikipedia", an online encyclopedia that can be edited and extended by any
Internet user. This "decentralized editorship" has as a consequence an
up-to-dateness reached by no printed lexicon.

I don't quite understand the concept of an "encyclopedia that can be
edited ..by (anyone)". One of the first times I'd come across
Wikipedia, was actually a link I found here about Schaefer beer. Here's
the first part of the entry (the rest is about Schaefer in Puerto Rico &
its ad campaigns):

"Schaefer Beer is a brand of beer from the United States. Schaefer beer
traces its beginnings back to 1848, when the Engels and Schaefer Brewing
Company was opened in Cedarburg, Wisconsin."

Wha? The famous Schaefer beer from the F & M Schaefer Brewing Company
of Brooklyn, NY, founded in 1842, had no connection with the above (but
similarly) named Wisconsin brewer.

"Schaefer was, at one point during the first half of the 20th century,
the world's best selling beer. By the 1970s, however, it had ceded that
spot to Budweiser."

Schaefer was NEVER the "best selling beer in the world". In the US,
Anheuser-Busch has been the largest brewer since Prohibition (save two
years during the 1950's when, due to a strike, Schlitz outsold them).
When Schaefer was in the "1 Million Barrel" group of brewers in the late
1930's, it was joined in that group with two other NYC metro area
breweries, Ruppert and Ballantine (along with A-B, Schlitz and Pabst).

Now, obviously, sales of individual BRANDS (as opposed to totals from a
brewer) are hard to track down, but it seems unlikely that Schaefer beer
EVER outsold Budweiser. In the pre-Prohibition era, Schaefer wasn't
even a particularly large NYC area brewer- outsold by Ehret, Ballantine,
B&S, Doelger, Ruppert & Everard (a lot of "who's?" in that list).
In 1961, A-B sold 9 Million barrels of beer compared to Schaefer's 3.5
Million. By the end of the decade, it' was 18.7 A-B vs. 5.4 Schaefer.

Now, Schaefer WAS once the predominate beer in NYC but, as sales slide
they weren't intially hurt since they distributed Bud in NYC (or so the
legend goes...).