How do you ensure RAG quality when the corpus contains contradictory information?

Acknowledge that retrieval will surface contradictions and design the generator prompt to report conflicting information rather than picking arbitrarily. For authoritative sources, use metadata to encode trust levels and prefer or filter by source during retrieval. For time-sensitive topics, prefer recent documents with timestamp metadata. In some domains, present multiple retrieved passages with citations and let the user judge, rather than collapsing to a single answer. Contradictions often reveal corpus quality issues that should be addressed at the data layer.