How does one get a 0.5 in any category in the leader board?
Short answer:
Ties.
Long answer:
In the old days of SotW, contests would occasionally end in a tie. For every tie, I split the one "win" among the winners, so those people each received half. (We never had a tie split three or more ways.
) Tying in a contest doesn't stop your active victory streak but causes your streak to increment by 0.5 rather than 1. This happened twice to
Teilyr.
Examples of contests that ended in ties are
#5,
#8, and
#58. The vote count in #58 is really misleading since Praethus declared a tie before extra votes were cast. This happened a lot back then and I'm not sure why. It made it a real pain to compile the data when I started the archives project.
Ties don't happen anymore. If two or more people have the same vote count when a contest ends, we break the tie using a super secret process.
I'll add your question to the FAQ in an upcoming update. Thanks for asking!