No, not everyone does. I see the distinction between percentage points and just percent most commonly in political and economic contexts, and sometimes scientific ones.
The ambiguity embodied in your usage is the kind of thing that crashes rockets; this is why every engineer I’ve ever worked with, for clarity’s sake, sticks to the usage I’ve described.
Why do you feel efficiency should be treated differently from any other percentage quantity, such as interest rate, or tax rate, or percentage of the population that are smokers?
Not that I regard Wikipedia as the final arbiter of truth, but why do you feel that Wikipedia is just plain wrong in this case?
Not really. Depending on why the efficiency has increased, the power output could have stayed the same, or increased or decreased by some other amount.
Until about a year ago I worked in performance testing of power plant. Precisely because of the potential for confusion highlighted in this thread, it is common to express differences in terms of heat rate (effectively, the inverse of efficiency). A 4% improvement in efficiency is ambiguous - a 4% improvement in heat rate is not.
This. Percentages are already something that is not intuitive to most people. Add to that the ambiguity of the language, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Why talk about a percentage increase of a percentage value? Are you talking about the value increasing by a certain number, or changing by a percentage of the value it was at? Why risk someone misinterpreting?
State the original value and the final value, and don’t worry about how much “percentage change” that is. Because if you state percentage change, 99% of the time the person is just going to need to convert that to the final value anyway. Skip the confusion, state the result.
“We were running at 42% efficiency, but we increased to 46%.”
Does anyone know if the California car registration was increased by Grey Davis by a factor of 3 or 4? The goofball news media around here reported it as both a 3x increase and a 300% increase. I can’t decide which way they misinterpreted it.