Anybody webmaster who knows the competition in Google's or Yahoo!'s search rankings knows the importance of inbound links. SEO experts have always been stressing on getting inbound links pointing to your site. While this does work, there is a difference is how the inbound links are weighed. For eg: 100 inbounds links from small sites may not be worth even close to one inbound link from a Yahoo!, CNN, BBC, or any other 'high quality' website for that matter. But what about 'Wikipedia' ?
Majority of the users trust Wikipedia as a source of 'reliable' information. As most of you know, the content of Wikipedia is user-editable. This means you could visit a page and edit it. When webmasters learn this, they are tempted to have inbound links from Wikipedia. They would create a shot article with their keyword in the title of the article and link to their websites either in the body of article or 'External links and references'. If this was not enough, it meant that your competitor could edit that article you created, and change the links to point them towards his site. Now that would be a very nasty game and result in a dreadful experience for millions who come daily to Wikipedia to get reliable information.
A simple attribute in hyperlinks, called as "rel" when set to "nofollow" does the needful. To see it, simply visit Wikipedia and view the HTML source of the page. Try to find the hyperlinks and observe that they have a rel="nofollow" attribute. This prevents the crawlers from attaching any significance to the link.
However, if you wish you still create a inbound link from Wikipedia, do it only if you have something of value to offer to your visitors. They might follow the link and visit your site. Good luck!
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