Hi!
In Freebase, we had bot scripts that went through and removed "Lists of Things" topic entities since they are lists of entities and not useful clumped together and normalized in a graph database.
Why delete them? Wikidata has a number of things which are not your standard "entity" - lists, sources, news, quotes, service entries, narrative articles (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans - it's not exactly "entity" like "human" or "fire"), etc. So I don't think the approach that singles out and excludes lists would help much - if you have an application that needs "individual entities" like "Douglas Adams" or "London" and exclude other types will have to exclude much more than just lists - but I think the approach of asking for exactly what you need and ignoring the rest may prove more efficient. I'm not sure there's really well-defined criteria to specify what "individual entity" actually is - I'm sure you have one that matches your application, but some other application may have completely different one. Generally, this can be solved by better classification I think, but so far I'm not sure what to base this classification on.