Q&A: Handling unreliable sources and fact-checking in a Wikipedia age — do your diligence, own mistakes, and nuance statements to match the strength of evidence

McDowell acknowledges he has included a story in his ethics book (2006) from a source he now needs to remove because he should have checked it more carefully. His advice: (1) Do your due diligence and double-check sources. (2) Own mistakes plainly when you make them. (3) Nuance statements based on the strength of evidence — do not dogmatically assert something if the evidence is not strong enough. His example: in Romans 7 with his students he acknowledged there are two competing interpretations and said he holds one but is not super confident and could be wrong. He tries to calibrate confidence to evidence.