topics proposals remove accurate existing topics and cannot reach the five-topic minimum #89

Status: Verified during the Pick Your AI rollout (reproduced, or read directly in the code).

Part of epic: Epic: Topics, descriptions, chips and social previews that fit real organizations.

Summary

The closed vocabulary lacks terms such as leaderboard, datasets, contributors and research areas. For pick-your-ai-research the proposal removes 7 of 10 existing topics.

Evidence

• Reproduced: current [ai, ai-infrastructure, ai-stack, compatibility, json-schema, llm, pcpartpicker, pick-your-ai, pricing, research]; proposed [pick-your-ai, workspace, contract, python, ai, llm]; removed [ai-infrastructure, ai-stack, compatibility, json-schema, pcpartpicker, pricing, research].
• R3 failed in every rollout repository; needs-input:domain-topic and topics-short were logged.

Impact

Applying the proposal destroys discoverability; ignoring it leaves R3 failing forever.

Proposed fix

Make proposals additive by default, report removals separately as needs-review, and let an org extend the vocabulary.

Acceptance criteria

• Default output never lists removals as proposals.
• An org-level topics_extra list is honoured by merge and by R3.

Tasks

Each task below is a sub-issue.

Prior work

Prior work: open PR #20 (opt-in --allow-t3 and the Pick Your AI family), open #7 and PR #13 (variant J badges), merged PRs #14 to #19 (icon art-direction path, UTF-8 output, registry-free org health and label planning, Windows test portability, footer URL repair) and closed issues #8 to #12. Nothing here duplicates those; where an item is already handled it is linked, not refiled.

Fresh VM verification: not run. Findings were verified on a Windows host; hosted CI is separate evidence.