I personally believe that it does help, I'm not questioning it.. Just wondering if there is any empirical evidence for it. I haven't experienced it personally, but if you want to give me some tips on how to get a link through feel free to hit me up on skype
I had a really good Wikipedia Link once, it was sending easily 100 uniques a day simply from the actual link. Also seemed to help my rankings for the keywords I was going after. Once that got kicked off the page, everything went to shit.