Do linkwheels work or not?

I've read a lot about how linkwheels are the ultimate weapon in getting high SERPs and then lots posts about how linkwheels are useless now and that Google had broken the linkwheel secret power blah blah blah.

Do they still work? Is making direct backlinks to your articles and website better?

In my opinion, linkwheels work better... I've seen a domain get a PR3 right after a 18 spike linkwheel.

On the other hand, I heard great stuff about articles. The best part being that webmasters will get the article and use it on their website, giving you backlinks in autopilot and from different IPs.

Why not do both? I mean, do an article linkwheel. There are at least 5 article directories I can think of. Enough for a small linkwheel. Then wait for webmasters to copy your linkwheel. Will try it myself.