Wikipedia:Wikipedia contributes to notability
Wikipedia contributes to notability.
Granted, for our purposes as Wikipedia editors, it does not, at least per the notability guidelines. It is not an admissible source, except in the occassional instance where citing Wikipedia in an article about some notable aspect of Wikipedia passes the ABOUTSELF threshold.
However, in the "real world", that is to say, outside of Wikipedia's community, Wikipedia articles absolutely do contribute to the notability of topics. If someone sees a Wikipedia article about a given thing, they will usually (fairly reasonably) assume that it is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, and they will treat it as such. People will learn about it from Wikipedia and spread information about it further, journalists will write about it more often using Wikipedia's article on it as a source (they will probably never stop doing this, no matter how many times we try to tell them), more journalists will write about the topic based on those journalists' accounts of the topic, and more people will see the all-important coverage of the topic, discussion about the topic will circulate further in both public and private forums, and people curious to know more about the topic will... check the Wikipedia article about it.
(Sure, some people will stop and say, "hey, this doesn't look like it deserves a Wikipedia article" and do something about it, but those people tend to become Wikipedia editors, and most people are not Wikipedia editors.)
No matter how much we may not want our coverage to inflate the notoriety of a given subject, we will unavoidably do so, nonetheless. This is why we have the notability guideline to begin with, and why we have policies on handling conflicts of interests amongst editors. Although we want to avoid Wikipedia's articles artificially inflating the notability of a non-notable topic, it absolutely does happen, and it will always happen as a matter of course.
Our duty as editors, thus, is to ensure that every new topic added to the encyclopedia is already notable enough for an article, so as to minimize the degree to which our work impacts the notability of a topic. We contribute to notability, as does basically everyone on this Earth giving their time, attention, and interest to anything at all, but we as Wikipedians must not be the sole arbiter of that notability.