This is a bug that has previously been fixed but has re-appeared.
On Trove (the Australian library content aggregator) everything comes with a pre-formatted Wikipedia citation which normally can be directly copied from Trove and pasted into Cite>Manual>Basic where it is "magically" transformed. Over the past day or so, this has stopped working and pasting the pre-formatted Wikipedia citations intto Cite>Manual>Basic stopped transforming.
Example from the QWiki Club session yesterday was this edit on Shire of Paroo
while trying to add the citation for
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/20691595
Having found this newspaper article, the user went to the "i" in a circle on the left-hand tool bar which generates a number of citation formats
which was then pasted into Cite > Manual > Basic which did not transform the wikitext
instead of doing this
as it normally does.
The problem was previously blamed on invisible characters / formatting within the text string when copied from the browser. However, the problem was fixed some time ago. The workaround was to paste the text into a absolutely-plain-text tool and then copy it out before pasting into Cite > Manual > Basic (I usually use Notepad on Windows). Unfortunately the club session was using a Mac lab (and none of us were regular Mac users) and we could not find a true "plain text" tool (we thought textedit should have worked but failed to figure out how to do it on its tool bar). The only way I could find to make it work with the group was to switch to source editor and add the citation that way. Unfortunately the group (who are mostly relative newcomers to Wikipedia) don't know source editor so I had to do that edit for the first person to experience the problem and the session collapsed as there was no way the users could continue on their own using VE.
In the Mac Lab we were using iMacs with Safari. However, I am also getting the problem at home with Windows 8.1 and Chrome, so it does not appear to be platform-specific. I am unaware of Trove undergoing any changes in this timeframe.
Please undo whatever changed and broke this. It was working beautifully before.