Is Link Wheel Black Hat or White Hat?

Is link wheel building a black hat or white hat technique? I bet many people, like myself, are looking for an answer for the above question. I have tried to search for a definite answer with no success. Probably link wheel building is a bit gray hat, all depends on how you are using it.

Many people prefer to create a link wheel in a pure white hat way, as it could be safe for your search engine ranking. Nothing funny, nothing fancy, just pure unique content for each article, and you believe your search engines will love your site a lot. That could be true. But some people also argue that, as long as you are building links for yourself, that's not natural, not completely white hat. They claim that backlinks should be built by your visitors naturally. As your visitors visited your website/blog, found your content interesting, they social bookmarked it or wrote about it in their own blogs - those are considered as good backlinks. Once I read something from an Adsense premium publisher, they did build their own backlinks at the beginning, and then at a later stage, their visitors are building backlinks for their site automatically. I bet many of us, website owners or bloggers, are waiting for that day.

On the other hand, it is easy to distinguish black hat link wheel from white hat ones. Many of the articles on the "spoke" sites could be poorly spun, or unreadable, or maybe the number of backlinks jump up tremendously overnight. Nowadays, search engines are getting smarter day by day, their algorithms are continuously improving to detect any abnormal linking pattern. If hundreds of backlinks show up in a short period of time, there is definitely something fishy going on. All of those could get search engines suspicious, and eventually your website might receive a drop in search ranking or even get deindexed.

So what is your preferred method of building a link wheel? Is it white hat? grey hat? or black hat?