While watching the Twitter posts fly by last night, I saw some from Robert Scoble (of course) talking about advertising, and suggesting to Twitter founder Ev Williams that he be allowed to share in the revenue from ads on the group IM service. Oh, I thought — is Twitter finally launching ads? Then came a post at TechCrunch that said it was. Or was it? Apparently not, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which emailed Biz Stone at Twitter and got a denial that any such plans were in the works.

As it turned out, a background image from Chinese Business Network blogger Christine Lu’s profile pic on Twitter popped up in a yellow box somehow, which made it look like an ad for the network, as she explained in a comment on the TechCrunch post. In other words, no story, right? Except that Duncan Riley of TechCrunch said in a subsequent comment that “ads are coming, it’s just a matter of when.” As more than one person has pointed out, however — including Frederic at The Last Podcast — this assertion comes without any real facts to back it up.

Nate Westheimer, a contributor to Silicon Alley Insider, also has a curious blog post in which he laments the state of blogging, which he says doesn’t pay enough attention to accuracy, and he uses Duncan’s post as an example. Which is fair enough, of course — except that Nate’s post is riddled with errors, including two different spellings of Duncan’s last name and a couple of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Fair enough, you might say — as Nate points out in a comment, he isn’t really a reporter. So is Duncan a reporter? Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.

Duncan and I have had our differences in the past, but I’m not here to beat up on him for the Twitter story. Should he have run with it based on what turned out to be very little factual information? I don’t see why not — but I think it should have been updated later, as others have. Nate says that this shows “the importance of journalistic standards, especially that of using reliable sources and having a standard for truth.” I’m not going to argue with that — having editors is a great thing (mostly). But journalism is about speed as well. It’s a classic battle between going with the story because you’re out of time, and checking one more source or fact.

This isn’t something the blogosphere invented — wire services like Reuters and Associated Press have been operating this way for decades. Report something as quickly as possible, then fix the mistakes later. It’s when the mistakes don’t get fixed that we have something to worry about, and as Thord Daniel Hedengren reminds us, we could all probably do better at that — regardless of what we call ourselves.

Another arrow got fired at wikipedia.org recently in USA Today, with an op-ed piece by John Siegenthaler Sr.., who writes about his outrage on finding an entry in the collaborative encyclopedia that described him as playing a role in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy — claims that remained uncorrected for four months and were repeated on other sites such as Answer.com. The New York Times writes about it here.

This is only the latest barrage of criticism aimed at the Wikipedia. Nicholas Carr made a splash a couple of months ago with an entry on his blog about the online encyclopedia and how incompetent and inaccurate many of the entries were. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales replied here and in this Register story. The former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica also took some shots at the Wikipedia in a piece written for on Tech Central Station (don’t even get me started on the whole “Adam Curry-taking-too-much-credit-for-podcasting” brouhaha).

Despite the criticisms, Steve Rubel remains convinced that the Wikipedia is “the next Google” (ironically, Steve’s post appeared the day before Mr. Siegenthaler’s piece appeared in USA Today). Rex Hammock has useful advice: “Use Wikipedia as a gateway to facts, not a source of them.” James Robertson, meanwhile, points out that “real-world” sources of information such as the New York Times, have their problems too, a point also made by Andrew Hargadon.

So is the Wikipedia fatally flawed, or does the self-correcting model of collaborative information eventually produce the best results? Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine says it may be flawed, but it’s also an opportunity. And Kevin Marks — who coincidentally enough is also a major player in the Adam Curry affair — has some worthwhile thoughts as well, including a quote from Douglas Adams in which he says that “what should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust… but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV.”

Update:

CNet News has a nice roundup on the Wikipedia’s week from hell, including comments from Jimmy Wales and Adam Curry. And Steve Rubel suggests that we should be able to “claim” Wikipedia entries that are about us.

Update 2 — December 11:

An enterprising Wikipedia critic tracked down the author of the Siegenthaler entry, who turned out to be just a guy working at a courier company who was playing a prank on a friend, and chose Mr. Siegenthaler because the family was well known in his area (Nashville). Interestingly enough, the guy said he thought Wikipedia was a gag site.