It also matters for eBird's breeding codes or other breeding estimates.
"Songbirds" are typically thought of as being those in the order Passeriformes. Woodpeckers of course are not in that order, and I never thought of them as having "songs". Looking at the descriptions in my Sibley guide, I don't see any species accounts that describe any woodpecker vocalizations as being "songs". Instead it refers to "contact calls," "drums," and "calls".
Yes, you're right, but--in Europe--Eurasian Green Woodpecker and Grey-headed Woodpecker are generally agreed to have songs. So does Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, Middle Spotted Woodpecker, Black Woodpecker and Wryneck (effectively, only the two
Dendrocopos sp. lack them). For example, more than a third of all foreground XC recordings of MSW are songs; almost 80% for Wryneck. They're not songs strictly speaking, but they are sounds considered to be their equivalent -- much like drumming should be marked marked as 'singing' in eBird's checklists, from what I read in the descriptions of the breeding codes. Also owls, pigeons and cuckoos don't sing in the narrow sense of the word, and yet their vocalisations are labelled as songs for the sake of convenience.
EDIT:
If eBird wants to institute new nomenclature for Eurasian woodpeckers, it should be applied consistently to all 'singing' woodpeckers, not just some genera. Currently, the changes apply to all black, white and red ones but no green, yellow and brown ones, ostensibly
-- nothing to do with the philogenetic tree: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Tg_OPpK9...1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-13+at+7.41.49+PM.png.
For the latter group, anything goes:
I was trying to research the difference between the 'territorial' calls (also described as songs) of Eurasian Green and Grey-headed Woodpeckers--and the difference seemed pretty clear cut ('krri' calls vs plaintive whistled notes)--when I came across this recording (Boris N. Veprintsev; Ryazan...
www.birdforum.net
One reason might be that green, yellow and brown ones are absent from the ABA area.
Such things wouldn't happen if there were a transparent and effective mechanism of communication with the public. And, being a dilettante myself, I'm not supposed to be the first person to discover these and other eBird ID issues,
like taking moulting males, labelled as males in the checklist, labelling them as females in the app/on the website because there were not enough female photos available & no one will notice (this time, not woodpeckers).
EDIT 2: Some of the irrelevant parts crossed out.