Last year, Wikipedia added “nearby” functionality to its desktop and mobile sites to let users find interesting content about subjects relevant to their location. The functionality has now come to the Android and iOS apps.

The feature shows you a list of articles for your location, and gives you the distance from where you’re at. There’s also a compass that points you in the right direction, which is pretty cool.

This could be a pretty interesting thing to have on hand while you’re traveling, if you’re not using Andrew Mason’s Detour app.

You can tap an entry to read the article or long-press and open it in map view.

“With this feature, we’re bringing Wikipedia into the world around you and enabling you to explore and learn more about your surroundings,” the Wikimedia Foundation says in a blog post. “Perhaps you’ve always wondered about that monument that you pass during your commute home, been curious about an architecturally interesting building, or simply wanted a to-do list while traveling. Now, the new Wikipedia app can surface those for you, and maybe it’ll even inspire you to add your own.”

The foundation also announced some ideas it wants to work on. These include filtering nearby items by category, searching for other articles that are near the article you’re reading, and letting you drop a pin on a map to see articles tagged near that location.

It looks like learning is going to continue to become more mobile.

Image via Wikimedia