What is the correct implementation of the Open Graph "article" type?

Have a look at the Facebook developers page: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/opengraph/object-type/article

It looks like your examples 2 and 3 have incorrect formatting. None of the "article" properties should begin with "og:"

Here's what I have on one of my sites, and I get no errors from the FB debugger:

<meta property='og:type' content='article' />
<meta property='article:author' content='https://www.facebook.com/YOUR-NAME' />
<meta property='article:publisher' content='https://www.facebook.com/YOUR-PAGE' />
<meta property='og:site_name' content='YOUR-SITE-NAME' />

You can use this killer Open Graph Article Generator tool to generate your code for you and to help answer any questions you have about formatting/protocol.

Open Graph Generator | Article

There's also a very helpful tip for the author property that says...

Provide a URL to the author's Facebook profile or a page with open graph data of type profile.

So you don't have to use a Facebook profile necessarily as long as there are Open Graph Profile tags on the page you link to. And if you're confused about the Open Graph Profile tags there's a Profile Generator too...

Open Graph Generator | Profile