List of steps to reproduce (step by step, including full links if applicable):
- [[Cairns Central]] had some uncited content. I found a newspaper article that was a source, so I copied the URL, opened the article in VE, positioned my cursor at the end of the bullet item "Target discount department store. The store temporarily pulled out of the centre in April 2021 to swap locations with Kmart. The store opened in November 2021."
- I clicked Cite, choose Automatic, pasted the URL, waited, it failed. OK, Cite> Manual > Website, filled in the URL, the title, the date, the two authors (first and last), the access-date and then saw the "website" box. Damn, I should have used Cite > News. But I had previoulsy noticed the appearance of that Change Reference Type at the bottom of the citation edit box and had thought "now that's a really useful thing, I so often do cite web instead of cite news". So, being in the precise situation, I thought, "Great, I'll use it".
What happens?:
And clicked it and it took me to the menu that you normally get to from "Cite > Manual", and I clicked News. And then found it had deleted every single part of the citation, not a single value was carried over into the corresponding field. I tried to Undo but the citation was completely gone.
What should have happened instead?:
It should have changed the Citation *type* (web to news) and retained the field values for at least those fields in common (authors, title, source date, access date, etc) and, ideally, for the obvious translable ones, (e.g. website -> name of publication). If it doesn't do those things, what is point of it. If I wanted to throw everything away and start from scratch, I would have just done that.
If what I experienced is the intended behaviour, I don't see who is helped by the presence of this button and the button's name is entirely misleading. "Give up and start again" might be a better name for it. Suggesting it is just changing the type of citation is entirely inaccurate.
Given that cite book, cite web, cite news, and cite journal have a huge overlap in their commonly-used parameters, I would have thought it not too hard to have implemented a translation between them with this button. Even if all that happened in terms of the underlying wikitext was to replace "cite web" with "cite news" (which is what I normally do by switching into the wikitext editor), that would be a better result than deleting the lot.
Software version (if not a Wikimedia wiki), browser information, screenshots, other information, etc.: