Symphony.

On a multi-author website it could be useful to know the number of entries per author and to be able to sort entries by author. But in S2 edit pages and/or datasources do not directly output the "system author". So what can I do?

I tried to include an author field for the section in question. But there is no "selected" value in the list on an entry's edit page, and so authors might oversee to select the right name, thus saving the first value in the list (which will be me, the admin) as author.

The only way I see at the moment is to create a frontend page (of type "admin") which uses special datasources to grab entries by author. But I would prefer to find this info directly in Symphony's backend.

Anybody has an idea? Are there any additional features planned?

Yes, this is a planned feature for the admin. Each section list page should have a search field for (obviously) searching, but it should also allow for field-specific searches like "author:George" to show the entries you're after. Additionally, system-level information like author should be treated the same as fields, so you shouldn't need to add an author field to perform this search.

I tried to include an author field for the section in question. But there is no "selected" value in the list on an entry's edit page, and so authors might oversee to select the right name

This must be a bug. Author fields should pre-select the currently logged in author.