"Our mission is to help scientists be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills. Our approach combines short, intensive workshops with self-paced online instruction. The benefits are more reliable results and higher productivity: a day a week is common, and a ten-fold improvement isn’t rare."
http://software-carpentry.org/
If you are writing tools to interact with Wikimedia data and software for your research, and you aren't a very experienced programmer, these videos and workshops can help you.