But when his obituaries appeared yesterday, there was an odd addition to Hazlehurst’s canon. Apparently he had emerged from retirement a few years ago to co-write the song ‘Reach’, a hit for Simon “Spice Girls” Fuller’s creation S Club 7.

“There could only be one source for this,” suggests Shaun Rolph, who tipped us off.

And yes – you can probably guess what it is:

A couple of seconds in Google takes you to a real, primary source, EMI Publishing, where the correct credit for ‘Reach’ is hidden in plain view: Cathy Dennis and Andrew Todd. The MCPS confirmed to us that the royalties are split 50:50 between the two composers.

So who fell for this?

Step forward BBC News, the Grauniad 2.0, the Independent, the Times, The Stage and Reuters – who all cut and pasted the phoney factoid from Wikipedia without a second thought. The Times‘ obituary writer professed to be surprised by Ronnie’s late-career comeback – but not so surprised he felt the need to check whether it was actually true.

Hats off to the Telegraph, however, for not supping from the poison cup of Web 2.0.

(For you trainspotters: an anonymous edit introduced the hoax into the entries for both Hazlehurst and the song last month; an editor spotted the hoax on the WWiki’s page about the song, but not the page for the composer. Subsequently, diligent Wikipedians even corrected the spelling of “Hazlehurst” – but not the false information itself.)

Recently, Tom Melly wrote here about how lazy hacks could look no further than Wikipedia for biographical information about his late father George – and rightly put the blame for the spread of misinformation on the journalists themselves.

But this is the first case of obituarists being hoaxed in such large numbers. It’s as well Wikipedia hasn’t branched out into the Funerals and Tombstones business.

Yet.

Adds Shaun:

“He was at the Beeb for 20 years and they clearly just spent five minutes on Wikipedia to prepare his obit. I’d feel happier if he had written Reach. I’d like to have seen S Club going through Hebden Bridge in a tin bath.”

With fantastic timing, the Guardian Arts blog asked yesterday, “Could the birth of literary software herald the rise of robotic authors?”.

Er… they’re working on it, folks. Starting with robotic reporters.

William Barrington-Coupe issued over 100 CDs of his wife, who hadn’t performed in public for 30 years, on his label Concert Artists Recordings. Recently Hatto, who died last year, had been rediscovered to great critical acclaim.

However, sound analysis commissioned by Gramophone magazine revealed very strong evidence that the CDs issued under her name were actually the clumsily-manipulated recordings of other performers.

Audio expert and sound restorer Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio told us last week it was “the biggest attempt at recording theft ever attempted”.

Barrington-Coupe initially denied the claims, but in a letter to the owner of a label whose work he illegally used, he finally confessed.

Gramophone reports the contents of his letter to BIS Records CEO Robert von Bahr. BIS’s recording of László Simon performing Liszt’s 12 Études d´exécution transcendante was one of the recordings identified on a Hatto CD.

In his letter, Barrington-Coupe admits to doctoring other people’s recordings and passing them off as his wife’s. According to Barrington-Coupe, he had been unable to master her authentic cassette recordings to CD, and began to “rerecord her repertoire”. He chose performers whose style and technique were simple, and gradually learnt new audio tricks such as stretching the sound. It’s a tall tale indeed, and Gramophone casts doubt on the plausibility of the hoaxer’s confession.

[stories about authenticity are fascinating]

In a statement on the BIS Records website last week, von Bahr said he would probably not sue for copyright infringement.

“Unless further, aggravating circumstances are discovered, we do therefore not intend to take any legal steps against those responsible for the possible infringement of the copyright of BIS Records.

Gramophone magazine has unearthed what one sound recording expert describes as “the biggest attempt at recording theft ever.”

Thanks to the internet, the formerly obscure British classical pianist Joyce Hatto had become a critical favorite shortly before her death last year.

In 2005, the Boston Globe described her as “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has heard of”.

The Guardian‘s music critic Jeremy Nicholas called the recordings “the most extraordinary recordings I have ever heard.”

“Best of all is her musical imagination, which finds original things to say about the most familiar music,” wrote a thrilled Globe critic.

The problem is, experts who have analysed her recordings say, is that they’re not original at all.

Over 100 CD recordings have been issued by Concert Artists Recordings, a record label run by her husband William Barrington-Coupe, all subsequent to her retirement from public performance thirty five years ago.

Sound engineer Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio, who performed an analysis of Hatto’s recordings on behalf of Gramophone, says every one of the CDs he has analysed can be attributed to another artist.

“We have yet to investigate a Hatto recording that has not proved to be a hoax,” concludes Rose. In several cases, says Rose, the original sound recording had been manipulated to disguise the source.

(Calls to the Concert Artists Recordings record label were not returned today.)

Unlike the case of JT Leroy, a celebrity author created by a San Francisco couple, who hired a relative to perform his public appearances, Joyce Hatto really existed. But Rose suggests that no recordings since 1970 can accurately be attributed to her.

“Joyce Hatto was a pianist of moderate status in the UK, and abroad was not considered to be a great. Then, later, she’s hailed as one of the greatest of all time,” he told us.

“Here we have an elderly lady who refuses to play concerts, in fact refuses to play for anybody, even friends, in any capacity.”

Barrington-Coupe has expressed surprise at the allegations and says he will perform his own sound analysis. A separate investigation has shown strong correlations between recordings attributed to Hatto, and other artists.

Hatto’s belated fame owes much to the internet, notes Rose.

“It’s a reputation that spread through the backwaters of the internet, thanks to online reviews and comments, message boards, and particularly on Usenet, ultimately resulting in the first major article in Gramophone magazine only a year ago. It’s a reputation that was built online.”

“Voices were raised,” he notes, but these were in a minority. Rose describes it as “utterly remarkable – the biggest attempt at recording theft ever attempted.”

There is one intriguing similarity with the JT Leroy case, however. Leroy’s painful “life history” – child prostitute, heroin addict – was an essential part of the authenticity of his appeal.

Here’s Barrington-Coupe on the missus, with our emphasis added:

“She doesn’t want to play in public because she never knows when the pain will start, or when it will stop, and she refuses to take drugs. Nothing has stopped her, and I believe the illness has added a third dimension to her playing; she gets at what is inside the music, what lies behind it.” ®

Last year Colbert satirized the project’s dependence on the consensus theory of truth – which for Wikipedians is a feature, not a bug. The project’s guideline “WP:V” states, “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth” [their emphasis] – and in practice this means that if you can can find a source on the notoriously reliable truth machine called the internet, then cobble up enough votes to support a notion, you win!

On his show The Colbert Report, the comedian seized on news that Microsoft had paid a contractor to fiddle with an entry about open source file formats.

There’s a transcript below to save you wrestling with the Comedy Channel’s user-unfriendly video player, but in short, Colbert urged viewers to amend the entry for “Reality” to read “Reality Has Become A Commodity”.

Viewers obliged, forcing Wikipedia’s version of Reality to be locked down, with administrators – quite wisely – warning of the damage that Californians could do to reality.

Here’s Colbert’s report.

I read the headline last week, “Microsoft offers cash for Wikipedia edit.”

And to those who say “That’s not what Reality is”, I say “Go look up it on Wikipedia”.