Excluding individual articles could be useful, where the title often appears in an unrelated context. (We should stop asking editors to link "Smith worked as a taxi driver" to the film "A Taxi Driver".) I don't think excluding categories would help much but others may see a use for it. The UX could be adding a template to the unwanted target, just as we do with {{No newcomer task}} at the other end of the link.

Implementing this shouldn't be that complicated. We already have logic for removing certain suggestions (which lives in PruningLinkRecommendationProvider); specifically, we remove suggestions that:

• would result in a red link,
• were already rejected by at least 2 newcomers.

This logic can be extended to remove other suggestions as well. If we want to disqualify articles designated in Community Configuration, it shouldn't be a problem.

That being said, until we implement T317290: Provide a mechanism to regenerate link recommendation task pool after configuration changes, such config changes would take very long to actually take effect (the task pool slowly refreshes, but only as link recommendations are actually used). Not sure if that would be sufficient.