No it isn't. For starters, the paper was "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments", which lays out its gist pretty succinctly, as does the abstract:
The "Dunning-Kruger Effect" is the term used after the fact to describe the key phenomenon observed within that paper, which showed that - compared to their more competent peers - incompetent individuals "will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria", will be less able "to recognize competence when they see it" (either in themselves or in others), have difficulties in gaining insight into their actual level of performance, and can improve their ability to recognize their (present) incompetence by becoming more competent and thus gaining the metacognitive skills needed to realize that they have performed poorly.
While the study does show some of the highly-competent understating their abilities (explainable by a separate phenomenon known as
imposter syndrome), they were observed to do so both less frequently and to a lesser degree than the incompetent overestimated their own ability. So the two phenomena are not equivalent, nor is the takeaway for the paper "everyone thinks they're average". Moreover, the term "Dunning-Kruger Effect" is
not used to encompass the results explainable by imposter syndrome, just to explain why those with low-ability tend to overestimate their performance.
Per Dunning himself: "In short, those who are incompetent, for lack of a better term, should have little insight into their incompetence—
an assertion that has come to be known as the Dunning–Kruger effect".
Never mind that this entire side argument is pure deflection consisting of you just trying to split hairs and score petty gotcha points by saying that the people accusing you of exactly that flaw are using the wrong term. Even if we were to take that as a given for the sake of argument, it's irrelevant, because you knew what they meant and the hair-splitting doesn't actually contest the point. It's just a semantic distraction.
And on that note, let's drop the 'for the sake of argument' handicap and
actually look at the definition:
Per the
Dictionary:
Per
Britannica:
Per
Psychology Today:
(As an aside, a percentile rank of 60+ is considered comfortably above average)
Per
Healthline:
Per
Advances in Experimental Psychology, Chapter 5 - The Dunning-Kruger Effect: On Being Ignorant of One's Own Ignorance:
And it's perhaps worth noting that the last one is again from Dunning himself.
So no. The Dunning-Kruger effect is not that "people in general believe themselves to be average". It is instead the phenomena in which a poor understanding of a topic leads a poor performer to grossly overestimate their abilities, frequently thinking themselves
above average, when in fact they were appreciably
below average.
Let me be frank here. Not only are you wrong, but your misrepresentation of it ends up demonstrating the underlying point being made against you: Your actual level of understanding is appreciably lower than you perceive it to be, and your presumption to the contrary is sabotaging and preventing you from rectifying that problem.
And that is a recurring issue with you that we're seeing in several topics. Your belief that you simply know better is making you double down on dumb mistakes that you could have entirely avoided if you had just taken the time to do a little honest research and checked your assumptions first. But because of that presumption that you know better, you don't even know what to look for and instead end up simply shopping around to find sources that you think agree with your beliefs, then claiming that source vindicates you and that therefore any good source must agree with
you them. Even then, you've demonstrated a tendency to do little more than skim, cherry pick, and otherwise bastardize them to claim they fit your preconceptions, to the point of even turning on your own sources once it was shown that they didn't actually say what you initially claimed.
By all appearances, this isn't a deliberate deception, but rather a product of you presuming that you have a reasonably high understanding of a topic that you in fact have very little understanding of. That is to say: you're exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger Effect.