GrailAtlasAn independent mechanical watch reference
English

What we don’t know

Every watch site shows you the fields it has filled in. This page shows the ones it hasn’t. The numbers below are counted from the catalog when the page loads, across all 779 references, and nothing on this page is written by hand.

The reason to publish this is on the principles page: honest absence beats false precision. A principle nobody can check is a slogan. So here is the checkable version.

Three answers, not two

Most catalogs have two states for a field: filled in, or blank. Blank does a lot of dishonest work in that arrangement, because it hides the difference between a fact nobody has looked up and a fact that does not publicly exist.

Recorded
A value is on file for this reference.
Brand publishes nothing
Someone went looking and the manufacturer does not publish it. This is an answer, not a to-do, and the catalog stores it as one. Only two fields can currently say this, because only two carry the marker that records it.
Not recorded
Nobody has filled it in yet. A genuine gap, and the only one of the three that is anybody’s fault.

The ledger

FieldRecordedBrand publishes nothingNot recorded
Case width
caseSizeMm
779
100.0%
0
0.0%
Case thickness
caseHeightMm
742
95.3%
37
4.7%
Lug-to-lug length
lugToLugMm
The single best predictor of whether a watch fits a wrist, and the one most brands decline to publish. The middle column is watches where we went looking and found nothing to record.
652
83.7%
57
7.3%
70
9.0%
Lug width (strap size)
lugWidthMm
No sourced pass has been run over this field. A reader buying a strap should measure rather than trust the blanks here.
39
5.0%
740
95.0%
Water resistance
waterResistanceM
742
95.3%
37
4.7%
Production years
yearsProduced
Several large brands, Lange and Tudor among them, publish no production dates for any reference. Those are the middle column, not gaps.
752
96.5%
27
3.5%
0
0.0%
Case material
caseMaterial
779
100.0%
0
0.0%
Crystal
crystal
746
95.8%
33
4.2%
Bezel material
bezelMaterial
700
89.9%
79
10.1%
Bracelet or strap
bracelet
761
97.7%
18
2.3%
Dial colours
dialColors
Not exhaustive by design. On a reference that shipped in dozens of colours, this lists the commonly traded ones rather than every variant.
748
96.0%
31
4.0%
Hour markers
dialNumerals
708
90.9%
71
9.1%
Dial finish and pattern
dialFinish
No sourced pass has ever been run over this field. An empty value here means the catalog has not recorded how the dial is worked, never that the dial is plain.
0
0.0%
779
100.0%
Complications
complications
An empty list is a real answer: a time-only watch has no complications. It is counted as recorded only when the row carries at least one, so the gap here is overstated rather than flattered.
635
81.5%
144
18.5%
Movement linked to a caliber page
caliberSlug
Every reference names its caliber in prose. This counts the ones matched to an entry in the curated caliber dataset, which is what makes "other watches sharing this movement" work. Never guessed: an ambiguous match is left empty.
304
39.0%
475
61.0%
Citations on the row
sources
The lowest number on this page and the one that matters most. Newer rows carry citations because a test now requires one; the rows added before that rule are grandfathered and are being worked through.
177
22.7%
602
77.3%

There is no score

Deliberately. A single completeness percentage would be easy to publish and would immediately become the thing worth improving, which is not the same as improving the catalog. The fields are also not equally important. A missing lug width costs a reader one measurement with a ruler. A missing citation costs them the ability to check anything else on the row.

What this page still doesn’t tell you

It counts whether a field has a value. It does not count whether that value is right, and those are different questions. A recorded figure can be wrong, and some are: the catalog runs an automated check for places where a reference’s prose and its structured row contradict each other. It currently holds 5 open disagreements about water resistance and 9 about which movement is inside, each needing a source before either side can be corrected.

The movement ones matter more than they sound. One of them is the difference between an in-house calibre and a Sellita, which is a claim buyers pay a premium for.

Four rows whose reference number we could not find

The worst version of a wrong field is a reference number that resolves nowhere, because then every other field on the row may be describing a watch that does not exist. Four are currently in that state, and rather than quietly remove them while the question is open, here they are.

A further 3 rows describe a watch that certainly exists but record a reference number that does not match the manufacturer’s scheme for it. Those are a string to correct rather than a row to reconsider, and they are tracked separately for that reason.

These were not found by looking for them. A check comparing each reference’s prose against its own spec table flagged a set of water-resistance disagreements, and the work of going to source each one turned up four references that could not be sourced because they were not there. A cheap consistency check found an expensive problem it was not designed to look for, by forcing someone to open the page.

Two rows are worth naming rather than leaving to be spotted. Dial finish sits at zero: no sourced pass has ever been run over it, so the catalog records nothing about how any dial is worked. Lug width is close behind at under five per cent. In neither case does a blank mean the watch lacks the property.

← Catalog stats · Principles · Post-mortems →