The "wikilink" alluded to above must be an "internal-style" link formed by using [[double brackets]] wiki markup (the link may be provided by transclusion and need not point to an existing page). Such links create entries in the pagelinks table, which is what actually gets checked to determine whether a page contains wikilinks.

Other types of links, including "external" links (formed with [single brackets]), interwiki links (to pages on other wikis), category links (which place pages into categories), and file links (which display files) do not count when using the 'link' method.

Changing this variable will not retroactively affect the existing count. To update it, you will need to run the maintenance/updateArticleCount.php script.